CHAP. 2.—PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO HIPPOCRATES. DATE OF THE ORIGINS OF CLINICAL PRACTICE AND OF THAT OF IATRALIPTICS.
Its succeeding history, a fact that is truly marvellous, remains enveloped in the densest night, down to the time of the Peloponnesian War;[2454] at which period it was restored to light by the agency of Hippocrates, a native of Cos, an island flourishing and powerful in the highest degree, and consecrated to Æsculapius. It being the practice for persons who had recovered from a disease to describe in the temple of that god the remedies to which they had owed their restoration to health, that others might derive benefit therefrom in a similar emergency; Hippocrates, it is said, copied out these prescriptions, and, as our fellow-countryman Varro will have it, after burning the temple to the ground,[2455] instituted that branch of medical practice which is known as “Clinics.”[2456] There was no limit after this to the profits derived from the practice of medicine; for Prodicus,[2457] a native of Selymbria, one of his disciples, founded the branch of it known as “Iatraliptics,”[2458] and so discovered a means of enriching the very anointers even and the commonest drudges[2459] employed by the physicians.