Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/40

 the Egyptian science of medicine is set forth in the last six of the forty-two hermetic books, which were composed, according to the prevailing belief, by the god Thot or Thoüt (= Hermes of the Greeks). The first one of these six books is devoted to the anatomy of the human body, the second one to the diseases to which it is liable, the third to surgery, the fourth to remedial agents, the fifth to the diseases of the eye, and the sixth to diseases of women. As to the remedial agents, Neuburger says that it has not been found practicable to identify more than a very few of the Egyptian drugs enumerated by Dioscorides. Homer, who wrote at least five hundred years B. C., has something to say on this subject in the Odyssey. His words are as follows:—

Such drugs Jove's daughter owned, with skill prepar'd, And of prime virtue, by the wife of Thone, Aegyptian Polydamna, given her. For Aegypt teems with drugs, yielding no few Which, mingled with the drink, are good, and many Of baneful juice, and enemies to life. There every man in skill medicinal Excels; for they are sons of Pason all.

A physician of the present age, on reading the histories of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and other oriental nations, finds it almost impossible to realize that many of the characters designated as gods and goddesses, possibly all of them, were not mythological persons, as they would have been termed only a few years ago, but real human beings like ourselves. Such, for example, was the opinion of Cicero who, when asked why these people were spoken of as gods, gave the following reply: "It was a well-established custom among the ancients to deify those who had rendered to their fellow men important services, as