Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/62

 taught his people from which springs they should drink, and who tested all the plants of his vast empire with reference to their healing properties. According to the legend the wall of his stomach was so thin that he could look through it and see everything that was going on in the interior of that organ. In this way he was able to carry on a large series of experiments upon himself in regard to the action of different poisons and their antidotes. It is also related that medical knowledge was still further advanced by the yellow Emperor Hoang-Ti who lived about 2650 B. C., and who is credited by the Chinese with having invented arithmetic and music. The treatise called "Noi-King," which deals with the subject of internal diseases and gives a systematic account of human anatomy, is also credited by the Chinese to this monarch; but Neuburger maintains that this book, which is still in common use in China, is of much more recent origin. There are several other medical treatises which deserve to be mentioned. Such, for example, are the following: the celebrated book on the pulse, written by Wang-Schu-Scho in the third century B. C.; two very important books written by Cho-Chiyu-Kei—one bearing the title "Schang-Han-Lun" (On Fevers) and the other that of "Kin-Kwéi" (Golden Casket);—the different treatises written by Tschang-Ki (tenth century A. D.) and published in the collection called "The Golden Mirror of the Forefathers in Medicine" (I-Tsung-Kin-Kien"); and, finally, the very popular modern work (in forty volumes) entitled "The Trustworthy Guide in the Science and Art of Medicine" ("Ching-Che-Chun-Ching"). Of these forty volumes, seven are devoted to nosology, eight to pharmacy, five to pathology, six to surgery, and the remainder to children's and women's diseases.

Anatomy, it appears, has never played other than a very insignificant part in the Chinese system of medicine. This is not to be wondered at when we remember that their religion makes the dissection of a human body a sin worthy of punishment. No mutilated person, the Chinese believed, would be permitted, upon reaching the domain of the dead,