The Medicine of the Old Testament.—There are no medical writings which give any information concerning the science and art of medicine as possessed by the ancient Israelites, but the Bible contains a number of passages that refer to matters which belong in the domain of medicine, and more particularly in that of social hygiene. The mosaic laws were framed with a view to the good of the Jewish people as a whole, and were directed to such matters as the prevention and suppression of epidemic diseases, the combating venereal affections and prostitution, the care of the skin, the systematizing of work, the regulation of sexual life, the intellectual cultivation of the race, the provision of suitable clothing, dwellings and food, the use of baths, etc. Many of these laws—like those, for example, which prescribe rest on the Sabbath day, circumcision, abstinence from eating the flesh of the pig, the isolation of persons affected with leprosy, the observation of hygienic rules in camp life, etc.—testify to a remarkably high degree of the power to reason correctly; and, when considered in the light of modern science, they seem to justify the prediction made in Deuteronomy iv., 6. A similar prediction (supposed to be spoken by God from Mount Sinai) is made in Exodus xix., 6: “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” That a large part of the credit given to Moses for the wisdom displayed in these sanitary laws really belongs to the Egyptians is shown by the text of Acts vii., 22: “And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.”
As regards the manner in which the Israelites treated the diseases which afflicted them the Bible furnishes ample proof of the fact that they placed their chief reliance upon prayers, sacrifices, and offerings at their temples, and made comparatively small use of medicinal agents, dietetic measures, and external applications. The favorable effect of David’s harp-playing upon the melancholia of King Saul furnishes the only instance, to be found in the Bible, of the curative value of music in certain mental disorders.
The story of Naaman (2 Kings v.) deserves to be mentioned briefly here. He was captain of the host of the King of Syria (about 894 B. C.) and a man of valor, highly esteemed by his master, but he was—according to the Bible statement—a leper. Learning casually that there was in Samaria a prophet who might be able to cure his disease, he put a large sum of money into his sack and departed for that country. “So Naaman came with his horses and with his chariot, and stood at the door of the house of Elisha. And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, Go and wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean.” Naaman, at first much displeased with the advice given to him by Elisha, and especially by the very informal manner in which it had been communicated to him, finally decided to follow the prophet’s instructions. “Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in Jordan, ... and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean. And he returned to the man of God, ... and came, and stood before him; and he said, Behold, now I know that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel: now therefore, I pray thee, take a blessing of thy servant.” Elisha, however, refused persistently to accept any reward for the advice which he had given. He simply said to Naaman: “Go in peace.” Before he departed, however, Naaman expressed to Elisha the hope that he would be pardoned if he yielded to the necessity of bowing down to the god Rimmon on certain occasions—as, for example, when he accompanied his master, the king, on his visits to the temple of that god for the purposes of worship. From the evidence furnished by this account, as given in the Old Testament, it is fair to assume that both Naaman and the writer of the book of Kings believed that the cure had been effected by supernatural means. The modern physician, however, is not ready to accept such an interpretation of the manner in which Naaman’s cure was effected, but prefers to believe that the supposed leprosy was in reality some curable form of skin disease which to the unprofessional eye appeared like the other malady. It might, for example, have been an aggravated general eczema, dependent upon such excesses of eating and drinking as a wealthy captain of the king’s host would be likely to indulge in. And if this supposition is correct, one cannot but admire the great practical wisdom of Elisha in advising Naaman to take seven baths—one a day presumably—in the river Jordan, a spot so far removed from his home that it would scarcely be possible for him to obtain any but the simplest kind of diet during this comparatively long period of time.
An interesting case of snake-bite is briefly related in Acts xxviii., 3–6. It is stated that “when Paul (after being shipwrecked on the Island of Melita) had gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his hand. And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, they said among themselves, No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live. And he shook off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm. Howbeit they looked when he should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly: but after they had looked a great while, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said that he was a god.” This narrative is interesting in several respects, but there is one feature that deserves to receive special mention, viz., the fact that Paul experienced no harm from the bite of a poisonous serpent—a wound which frequently proves fatal. Inasmuch as the account distinctly states that the reptile “fastened on his hand” and that “the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand,” the conclusion is warranted that one or both of the creature’s fangs had entered the hand by a curving route, and probably in such a manner that the free end of each fang, from which the poison is ejected, passed completely through the skin from within outward. When the bite of a poisonous snake is of a character such as I have just described,—and not a few of them have this character,—only a very small quantity of the venom is lodged in the subcutaneous tissues, where the larger blood- and lymph-channels lie, and as a consequence the person bitten escapes serious harm. On the other hand, when the fangs enter the flesh in a less decidedly curving direction, thus permitting a greater quantity of the venom to reach and remain in the deep-lying tissues, serious or even fatal results may be anticipated. The point, then, which I desire to make is simply this: Paul’s escape from death in this instance may perfectly well be ascribed to natural causes.
The Israelites, at a certain stage of their history, appear to have completely divorced the practice of medicine from the priestly function. In one place, for example, it is stated that King Asa sought relief from his ailment, not from Jehovah, but from the physicians. Jeremiah expresses astonishment that not a single physician is to be found in Gilead. May this not be interpreted as signifying that regularly established physicians were at that time (595 B. C.) to be found in some parts of Palestine? And, at a much earlier period (1500 B. C.), Job calls his friends “physicians of no value” (Job xiii., iv.). From these and a number of other statements in the Bible it seems permissible to believe that, at a very early period of history, the Jewish physicians occupied an entirely independent position.
It would doubtless appear strange to most readers of this brief sketch of the history of medicine if some reference were not made in this place to Luke, the author of the gospel which bears his name and of the Acts of the Apostles, and who was also the companion of Paul on his journey to Rome and during a portion of the latter’s stay in that city. Luke was a native of Antioch, in Syria, and not a Jew. He was a physician and tradition says that he was also a painter. It is not known where he received his medical training, but it is not at all unlikely that he studied at Alexandria, in Egypt, where the greatest facilities for such training, obtainable at that period, were to be found. His style of writing shows plainly that he was a man of considerable cultivation and endowed with a clear and logical mind; and if he had not possessed a genial personality he would hardly have been known as “the beloved physician”; nor could any other motive but those of loyal, self-sacrificing friendship for his friend, and a desire to promote the cause of Christianity, have led him to share with Paul the dangers and discomforts of the journey to Rome.
The Medicine of India, China and Japan.—It would be too much of a departure from the plan which is being followed in the writing of this history to attempt to describe, even in the briefest manner, the mode of development of the science and art of medicine in India, China and Japan. Unquestionably the earlier physicians of these countries made many valuable contributions to medical knowledge, but they were made at such a period of time, or under such conditions, that they could not have exerted an appreciable influence upon the development of medicine in ancient Greece,—certainly no such influence as was exerted by Assyria and Persia, and especially by Egypt. It therefore seems permissible to speak of the medicine of these more remote countries only incidentally, and not as an integral part of the series of centres of learning which made the medicine of ancient Greece the direct ancestor—if I may use such a term—of European medicine.[11] In conformity with this idea it will be well to mention here briefly a few of the more important facts relating to the achievements of the physicians of the three countries named.
The most celebrated medical authors in India were Caraka, Súsruta and Vagbhata—“The ancient trinity,” as they were called. Caraka probably lived during the early part of the Christian era, Súsruta during the fifth century, and Vagbhata not later than during the seventh century A. D. It is apparent, therefore, that none of the treatises written by these authors could have exerted the slightest influence upon the growth of medical knowledge in ancient Greece.
The crudeness of many of the conceptions held by these Hindu physicians concerning pathology is revealed in the following definition: “Health is the expression of the normal composition of the three elementary substances (air, mucus and bile) which play a vital part in the machinery of the human body, and it is also dependent upon the existence of normal quantitative relations between these three substances; and when the latter are damaged, or when they are abnormally increased or diminished, then disease of one kind or another makes its appearance.”[12]
Great stress was laid by the physicians as well as by the priests of ancient India upon the observance of very elaborate rules respecting the care of the person while in health and, very naturally, when a patient became ill the physician in charge paid quite as much attention to the employment of hygienic and dietetic measures in effecting the desired cure as to the administering of drugs.