Amongst the most famous of the school were Agathinus of Sparta (1st cent. A.D.), who founded the Episynthetic sect, though Galen refers to him as among the Pneumatici. He was a pupil of Athenæus, and the tutor of Archigenes. None of his writings are extant. Theodorus was a physician mentioned by Pliny.[491]
Archigenes of Apamæa, who practised in Rome (A.D. 98-117), was exceedingly famous. He is mentioned several times by Juvenal,[492] and was the most celebrated of the sect. He wrote on the pulse, and attempted the classification of fevers. Very few fragments of his works remain. He was the first to treat dysentery with opium.
Aretæus of Cappadocia (1st cent, A.D.) was a celebrated Greek physician who wrote on diseases, detailing their symptoms with great accuracy and displaying great skill in diagnosis. He was very little biased by any peculiar opinions, and his observations on diseases and their treatment have stood the light of our modern medical science better than those of many of the ancient authorities. He was acquainted with the fact that injuries to the brain cause paralysis on the opposite side; and his classification of mental diseases is as good as our own. His knowledge of anatomy was considerable, and in his physiology he shows how much more the ancients knew of this branch of science than is generally supposed. He was acquainted with the operation of tracheotomy, and remarked its partial success.[493]
He considered elephantiasis to be contagious, and gives this caution: “That it is not less dangerous to converse and live with persons affected with this distemper, than with those infected with the plague; because the contagion is communicated by the inspired air.”[494]
Herodotus (there were several of the name) was a physician of repute in Rome (about A.D. 100). He was a pupil of Athenæus or Agathinus, and wrote several medical books which are quoted by Galen and Oribasius. He first recommended pomegranate root as a remedy for tape-worm, and described several infectious diseases.[495]
Heliodorus (about A.D. 100) was a famous surgeon, and wrote on amputations and injuries of the head. His operation for scrotal hernia is described by Haeser as “a brilliant example of the surgical skill of the Empire.” He treated stricture of the urethra by internal section.
Cassius Felix lived in the first century after Christ, and was the author of a curious set of eighty-four medical questions and their answers. He was also called Cassius Iatrosophista.
Leonidas of Alexandria lived in the second or third century after Christ, was a distinguished surgeon, who operated on strumous glands, and amputated by the flap operation.
Claudius Galenus, commonly called Galen, or, as mediæval writers named him, Gallien, was a very celebrated physician and philosopher, who was born at Pergamos in Asia, A.D. 131, under Hadrian. His father, Nicon, was an architect and geometrician, a highly cultivated and estimable man. His mother was a passionate scold, who led her husband a worse life than Xantippe led Socrates. Nicon spared no pains to give his son an education which should fit him to be a philosopher, and in his fifteenth year he was a pupil of the Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and Epicurean philosophies. In his seventeenth year his father, in consequence of a dream, changed his intentions concerning his son’s profession, and determined that he should study medicine. His first tutors were Æschrion, Satyrus, and Stratonicus. He studied the doctrines of all the sects of medicine in the school of Alexandria, and travelled in Egypt, Greece, Asia, and Italy. He devoted himself to none of the schools of medicine whose doctrines he had studied, but struck out a path for himself. On his return to Pergamos, he was selected to take charge of the wounded gladiators, a position which afforded him opportunities for studying surgical operations. He filled this post with great reputation and success. When he was thirty-four years old he went to Rome for the first time, remaining there four years, and acquiring a great reputation for his knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and medicine. He was connected with many persons of great influence, and his popularity at last became so great that it excited the ill-will of his professional brethren, especially as by his lecturing, writing, and disputing, his name was constantly before them. So great was the ill-feeling they bore towards him that he was afraid of being poisoned. He was called the “wonder speaker” and the “wonder worker.”
“The greatest savant of all the ancient physicians,” says Sprengel, “was Galen. He strove to introduce into medicine a severe dogmatism, and to give it a scientific appearance, borrowed almost entirely from the Peripatetic school. The enormous number of his works, the systematic order which distinguishes them, and the elegance of their style, won over, as by an irresistible charm, the indolent physicians who succeeded him, so that during many ages his system was considered as immovable.”[496]