Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/34

 (such as the death of the king, the occurrence of the plague or of war, etc.) from various telluric and cosmic phenomena—an eclipse of the sun, peculiarities of the weather, the condition of vegetation, etc. The deeply rooted love of the human race for the supernatural—a characteristic to which I have already briefly referred—facilitated the development of this harmful practice, and kept it alive through many succeeding centuries. Walter Scott, in his romance entitled Quentin Durward, gives an admirable portrait of a typical astrologer whom Louis XI. of France maintained at his court during a part of the seventeenth century.

While in other parts of the Orient the science of medicine, as already stated at the beginning of this chapter, made a noteworthy advance beyond the conditions observed among the primitive races, in Mesopotamia this science, which was far more important to the welfare of its inhabitants than all the other branches of knowledge combined, received very little attention and consequently made only insignificant advances. The British Museum has in its possession several thousand tablets which were dug up from the ruins of Nineveh and which represent a part of the library of the Assyrian King, Assurbanipal (668-626 B. C.). Translations of the text of only a very few of these tablets have thus far been published, and from these, which embody the greater part of our knowledge of Assyrian medicine, it appears that, for the present at least, the estimate recorded above must stand. A few new facts, however, have been brought to light, and they appear to be of sufficient importance to merit brief consideration here.

In the first place, Herodotus, who visited Babylon about 300 B. C., has this to say in relation to the state of medicine in that city:—

The following custom seems to me the wisest of their institutions next to the one lately praised. They have no physicians, but, when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves or have known any one who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their