The discovery of the practice of purging as a remedy was attributed to Melampus. But we know that the Egyptians made use of purgative and emetic medicines. There were many purgatives in use in the time of Hippocrates, as hellebore, elaterium, colocynth, and scammony. All these medicines could not have been discovered at once, as Le Clerc points out; mankind, therefore, must have gradually acquired their use. When persons were overloaded in the stomach and constipated, nothing was more natural than that they should seek relief by removing the mechanical causes of their distress. Some one had taken some herb which had caused him to vomit or to be purged, and had experienced the benefit of the evacuation; he told his friends, and they perhaps had been aided by similar means. Or again, some illness had been alleviated by the supervention of diarrhœa, and art was called in to imitate the beneficial effect of nature’s cure. In this way, says Le Clerc, bleeding may reasonably have been discovered: a severe headache is often relieved by bleeding from the nose, what more natural than that the process of relief should be imitated by opening a vein?
Pliny, indeed, in his usual manner, introduces a fable to account for the discovery of venesection. He says[344] that the hippopotamus having become too fat and unwieldy through over-eating, bled himself with a sharp-pointed reed, and when he had drawn sufficient blood, closed the wound with clay. Men have imitated the operation, says Pliny. This is matched by the story of the ibis with her long bill being the inventor of the clyster. Most of the medical beast stories are probably on a level with these.
Hygeia, the wife of Æsculapius, and her children, bore names which show the same poetic fancy as that which constituted Apollo the author of medicine. Æsculapius is the air. Hygeia is health; Ægle is brightness or splendour, because the air is illumined and purified by the sun. Iaso is recovery, Panacea the universal medicine, Roma is strength.
The ancients everywhere believed that the healing art was taught to mankind by the gods. “The art of medicine,” says Cicero, “has been consecrated by the invention of the immortal gods.”[345]
Hippocrates[346] attributed the art of medicine to the Supreme Being. As the Greeks believed that the arts in general were invented by the gods, it was a natural belief that the knowledge of medicine should have been taught by the heavenly powers. The mysteries of life, disease, and death were peculiarly the province of supernatural beings, and man has ever attributed to such powers all those things which he could not comprehend.
The Temples of Æsculapius.
The worship of Asclepius or Æsculapius is so closely associated with the practice of Greek medicine that it is impossible to understand the one without knowing something of the other. Sick persons made pilgrimages to the temples of the god of healing, just as now they go to Lourdes, St. Winifred’s Well, or other famous Christian shrines for the recovery of their health. After prayers to the god, ablutions, and sacrifices, the patient was put to sleep on the skin of the animal offered at the altar, or at the foot of the statue of the divinity, while the priests performed their sacred rites. In his sleep he would have pointed out to him in a dream what he ought to do for the recovery of his health. Sometimes the appropriate medicine would be suggested, but more commonly rules of conduct and diet would suffice. When the cure took place, which very frequently happened by suggestion as in modern hypnotism, and by the stimulus to the nervous system consequent upon the journey, and the hope excited in the patient, a record of the case and the cure was carved on the temple walls. Thus were recorded the first histories of cases, and their study afforded the most valuable treatises on the healing art to the physicians who studied them. The priests of Æsculapius were sometimes called Asclepiads, but they did not themselves act as physicians, nor were they the actual founders of Greek medicine. The true Asclepiads were healers and not priests. Anathemata (ἀνάθεμα, anything offered up) were offerings of models in gold, silver, etc., of diseased legs, feet, etc., or of deformed limbs consecrated to the gods in the temples by the devotion of the patients who had received benefit from the prayers to the deities who were worshipped therein. The priests of the temples sold these again and again to fresh patients.
The Early Ionic Philosophers.
The various schools of Greek philosophy were intimately associated with the study of medicine. They endeavoured to fathom the mystery of life, and the relationship of the visible order of things to the unseen world. The philosophers were therefore not only physicists, but metaphysicians, and the unhappy science of medicine, a homeless wanderer, had to shelter herself now with the natural philosophers and again with the metaphysicians. Probably the philosophers never really practised physic, but merely speculated about it, as did Plato. A brief notice of the various philosophers of the Ionic, Italian, Eleatic, and Materialistic schools who were more or less associated with the study of medicine must suffice as an introduction to Greek medicine proper, which had its origin with Hippocrates.
Thales of Miletus (about 609 B.C.), the Ionian philosopher, introduced Egyptian and Asiatic science into Greece. He had probably in his travels in the land of the Pharaohs devoted himself to mathematical pursuits, and if not a scientific inquirer was a deep speculator on the origin of things. He held that everything arises from water, and everything ultimately again resolves itself into water. Everything, he said, is full of gods; the soul originates motion (the magnet has a soul, according to him), and so the indwelling power or soul of water produces the phenomena of the natural world. He must not, however, be understood as teaching the doctrine of the Soul of the Universe, or of a Creating Deity. Thales was the first writer on physics and the founder of the philosophy of Greece. Le Clerc connects him with medicine by his converse with the priest-physicians of Egypt, and that he had performed certain expiatory or purifying ceremonies for the Lacedæmonians which could only be done by such as were divines and physicians.[347]