It was at this period that physicians began to practise surgery, which was first taught with great repute in the Alexandrian school, and where Ammonicus and Sostrates, surnamed the lythotomists, first distinguished themselves by this important operation.
While the science of medicine thus flourished in Greece and Egypt it was scarcely known in Rome, where the first physician who ventured to practise was Archagathus from Peloponnesus. At first the bold adventurer was favourably received, but his operations having shocked a people who constantly glutted their eyes in scenes of horror, and who beheld the blood of gladiators flowing in their arena or streaming under the lictors axe! the imprudent practitioner was stoned to death by the populace, and a hundred and fifty years elapsed ere another physician could be induced to visit the ungrateful country, nor was it until the time of Pompey and of Cæsar that any medical men dared to visit the “eternal city.”
The first of these was Asclepiades, who commenced by giving lessons of rhetoric, which were succeeded by lectures on physic, in the first school of medicine which he founded in Rome. It was on these benches that Aufidius and Nico, Artonius and Niceratus were initiated in the art of healing, while Asclepiades formed his celebrated disciple Themison founder of the sect of the Methodists or Solidists. To this school are we also indebted for the learned Celsus justly called the Cicero of medicine. Under Trajan and Adrian the medical profession had attained great celebrity and splendour, and under M. Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius the world became indebted to the glorious labours of Galen—but the bright days of the healing art were sinking with the star of Rome in the dark horizon of barbarism, and the works of these illustrious masters were sacrificed at the shrine of astrology, magic, and Eastern theosophy.
From this period we find Eastern superstitions mingled with the early practices and creed of Christianity, when, to use the words of Sprengel, “An allegorical explanation of words and even of the scriptures, was carried so far by the Jews that it was considered the utmost perfection of human learning. The essence of every science, and the only method of obtaining, without laborious studies, and in a state of idle contemplation, a degree of wisdom beyond the reach of all other mortals. It is thus that during the first century of our era the science of Cabala arose, a tissue of all the chimeras of Zoroaster, Pythagoras, and the Jews, and which in time, to the shame of human intellect, invaded the domain of learning, and became closely connected with medicine.”
In the commencement of the second century of the church, Acibba published a work called Jezirach, and Cimeon-Ben-Ischai wrote his book entitled Sohan, in which their cabalistic labours sought to prove, that there existed a supreme being from whom emanated ten angels, who formed the first world, in which resided three personified abstractions—knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom.—Besides this first or primitive world, there existed three others moving in concentric circles—the world created, the world formed, and the world constructed! So united, so constructed, that whatever might happen in the last of these worlds had already existed in imagination in the first. From this theory it was maintained that the practice of physic was to call into action all the powers of the superior worlds; a problem that could only be solved by a cabalistic physician, who by his piety and contemplation had succeeded in rendering himself worthy of a communication with celestial agency.
Facts and observations recorded by long experience were now considered useless and contemptible data, and all terrestrial knowledge despised. Anatomy was deemed worse than useless, and the established doctrines of various schools a dead letter. Chaldean, Phœnician, Hebrew words with mystic significations were introduced as symbolic illustrations of science: no language that could be understood, was deemed intelligible, and any system that could bear the test of reason was denounced as impious.
Thus was the career opened to the craft of priests boundless. It had been believed that the apostles were gifted with the power of healing by the mere apposition of their hands, and their self-named descendants pretended to possess the same divine attributes—and not only beatified monks cured with various oils and ointments; but their very mortal remains, became precious in the hands of their monastic successors. When their mouldering bones had been sold wholesale and retail as precious relics, their very sepulchres and their shadows brought hosts of pilgrims to herd round their shrines.
The study of medicine destroyed with the glories of Rome, was revived in Egypt, where Zeno of Cyprus delivered courses of lectures at Alexandria, a school which soon after dwindled into decay, sinking into obscurity with the once famed academies of Greece.
The Roman empire dismembered, Persia became an asylum for fugitive philosophy, and the Nestorians founded a medical school at Edessa in Mesopotamia, while other sectarians equally oppressed by ostensible orthodoxy, sought a refuge in the city of Dschondi-Sabour, where numbers of Persian and Arabian students flocked to learn their doctrines, and thus we have the origin of the celebrated school of Bagdad under the protection of their caliphs.
This regeneration of science was soon communicated to the shores of Europe, and the Caliph Alhakam founded a school at Cordova possessing upwards of 300,000 volumes, and Seville, Toledo, Saragossa, and Coimbra followed the bright example. Thus was a science, banished from Europe by bigoted and misguided Christians, restored to its former seat by Mohammedans.