Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/47

 CHAPTER III

ORIENTAL MEDICINE (Continued)

The Medicine of the Ancient Persians.—After Cyrus the Great had put an end to Babylon as a power among the nations the Persians became the leaders in all the affairs not merely of Asia Minor but also of the entire country from India to the shores of the Mediterranean; in fact, they eventually also gained control of the land of the Pharaohs. Notwithstanding the completeness of the political power which they possessed over these conquered races, they permitted them to retain their respective religions and even their individual languages; as evidence of the correctness of which last statement the modern discovery of inscriptions written in the three principal tongues may be mentioned. The remarkable degree of general culture which existed at Babylon at the time of the Persian conquest, and which the Sumerians and Semites had originally introduced, was left undisturbed by the political change.

So far as we possess any knowledge regarding the medicine of the ancient Persians, this information has been derived, according to Neuburger, from the Zend-Avesta—one of the ancient religious writings preserved by the Parsees. It furnishes comparatively few facts of special interest to physicians. In the main, the practice of medicine must have differed very little from that employed by the earliest Babylonian physicians, and briefly described on pages 11-16. There are one or two additional matters, however, which deserve to be mentioned here. It was maintained, for example, that the touching of a corpse produced a special contamination, a belief which interfered most seriously with the study of anatomy, and therefore