[27] After Alexandria first came under Roman rule (about 30 B. C.) membership in the Museum was granted to athletes and other men of no education, and it is said that even before that time Ptolemy Euergetes, who had reopened the schools during the latter part of his reign, bestowed some of the important positions upon men who were simply his favorites. The library of the Museum was seriously damaged by fire at the time when Julius Caesar was being besieged in Alexandria by the inhabitants of that city, and was at last wholly destroyed by Amrou, the Lieutenant of the Caliph Omar, in A. D. 651. The truth of this extraordinary tale regarding the burning of books belonging to the library at Alexandria in the seventh century is seriously doubted by Sismondi (Histoire de la Chute de l’Empire Romain, Vol. II., p. 57). “It was,” he says, “published for the first time, by Abulpharagius, about six centuries after the event is supposed to have occurred. And yet the contemporaneous national historians, Entychius and Elmacin, make no mention of it whatever. An act of this nature, furthermore, would be in direct conflict with the precepts of the Koran and with the profound respect which the Mohammedans habitually entertain for every scrap of paper on which the name of God happens to be written.”
Under the later rule of the Romans, Alexandria regained a good deal of its literary importance and also became a chief seat of Christianity and theological learning; but as a centre of medical influence its glory had long since departed.
[28] Asclepiades was not a descendant of Aesculapius, as one would naturally infer from the name which he bore.
[29] It would not be easy to fix, even approximately, the date when remedies of this character ceased to find acceptance in the popular mind of Europeans, but there can be no doubt that they were employed rather frequently even as late as during the eighteenth century;—indeed, measures that strongly smack of superstition are now and then looked upon with favor by the well-educated members of our modern society. For many centuries, however, they have been abandoned by all physicians excepting those who are unworthy to bear that honored title.
[30] Neither Haller nor Dezeimeris furnishes any biographical information with regard to Musa.
[31] Antoninus Pius, however, established the rule that these privileges were not to be granted to all physicians indiscriminately, but only to a limited number; and, later still, it was decided that only the parish physicians were entitled to receive them.
[32] It seems almost unnecessary to call attention to the fact that the subject of these remarks is not to be confounded with Thessalus, the son of Hippocrates.
[33] Ἰατρονίκης is the word employed in the original Greek.
[34] The word “metasyncrisis,” as we are assured by Le Clerc, was employed first by Cassius, one of the earlier disciples of Methodism, and then, long after the time of Thessalus, by Galen, Oribasius, Aëtius and Paulus Aegineta.
[35] Le Clerc calls attention to the incorrectness—etymologically speaking—of the use of the word “Eclectics” in connection with a school or sect. The members of such a body are not, he says, “the chosen ones” as the term signifies, but “the choosers.”