CHAP. 1. (1.)—THE ORIGIN OF THE MEDICAL ART.
The nature and multiplicity of the various remedies already described or which still remain to be enlarged upon, compel me to enter upon some further details with reference to the art of medicine itself: aware as I am, that no one[2451] has hitherto treated of this subject in the Latin tongue, and that if all new enterprises are difficult or of doubtful success, it must be one in particular which is so barren of all charms to recommend it, and accompanied with such difficulties of illustration. It will not improbably suggest itself, however, to those who are familiar with this subject, to make enquiry how it is that in the practice of medicine the use of simples has been abandoned, so convenient as they are and so ready prepared to our hand: and they will be inclined to feel equal surprise and indignation when they are informed that no known art, lucrative as this is beyond all the rest, has been more fluctuating, or subjected to more frequent variations.
Commencing by ranking its inventors in the number of the gods,[2452] and consecrating for them a place in heaven, the art of medicine, at the present day even, teaches us in numerous instances to have recourse to the oracles for aid. In more recent times again, the same art has augmented its celebrity, at the cost perhaps of being charged with criminality, by devising the fable that Æsculapius was struck by lightning for presuming to raise Tyndareus[2453] to life. And this example notwithstanding, it has not hesitated to relate how that others, through its agency, have since been restored to life. Already enjoying celebrity in the days of the Trojan War, its traditions from that period have acquired an additional degree of certainty; although in those times, we may remark, the healing art confined itself solely to the treatment of wounds.
CHAP. 2.—PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO HIPPOCRATES. DATE OF THE ORIGINS OF CLINICAL PRACTICE AND OF THAT OF IATRALIPTICS.
Its succeeding history, a fact that is truly marvellous, remains enveloped in the densest night, down to the time of the Peloponnesian War;[2454] at which period it was restored to light by the agency of Hippocrates, a native of Cos, an island flourishing and powerful in the highest degree, and consecrated to Æsculapius. It being the practice for persons who had recovered from a disease to describe in the temple of that god the remedies to which they had owed their restoration to health, that others might derive benefit therefrom in a similar emergency; Hippocrates, it is said, copied out these prescriptions, and, as our fellow-countryman Varro will have it, after burning the temple to the ground,[2455] instituted that branch of medical practice which is known as “Clinics.”[2456] There was no limit after this to the profits derived from the practice of medicine; for Prodicus,[2457] a native of Selymbria, one of his disciples, founded the branch of it known as “Iatraliptics,”[2458] and so discovered a means of enriching the very anointers even and the commonest drudges[2459] employed by the physicians.
CHAP. 3.—PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO CHRYSIPPUS AND ERASISTRATUS.
In the rules laid down by these professors, changes were effected by Chrysippus with a vast parade of words, and, after Chrysippus, by Erasistratus, son[2460] of the daughter of Aristotle. For the cure of King Antiochus—to give our first illustration of the profits realized by the medical art—Erasistratus received from his son, King Ptolemæus, the sum of one hundred talents.
CHAP. 4.—THE EMPIRIC BRANCH OF MEDICINE.
Another sect again, known as that of the Empirics[2461]—because it based its rules upon the results of experiment—took its rise in Sicily, having for its founder Acron of Agrigentum, a man recommended by the high authority of Empedocles[2462] the physician.