Having made mention of the officina medici, we think it opportune to explain here with some precision what is to be understood by this term.[57] Medicine and surgery were practised in ancient times in open shops; this was so in Greece, and later also in Rome. When the practice of medicine became secularized through its abandoning the Æsculapian temples, doctors’ shops began to arise in the most important centres of population, to which those in need of assistance resorted or were carried. In time these stations for the practice of medicine, and particularly of surgery, became more and more numerous.
The Hippocratic collection contains a special treatise (De officina medici), which speaks of the conditions these places were expected to fulfil, the articles therein to be contained, the instruments, the general rules relative to operations, the bandages, etc.
About six hundred years later, Galen wrote three books of commentaries on this treatise of Hippocrates. He says, among other things, that the doctor’s shop ought to be spacious and furnished with wide openings, to let in abundance of light. These medical stations to which the sick and infirm repaired in great numbers to ask advice, to undergo operations, or receive medical dressings, must have been of great importance, as is to be presumed from the cited books of Hippocrates and Galen.
The greatest doctors of antiquity practised the medical art in these places. It is also said that the great philosopher and naturalist, Aristotle, who came of a race of doctors, had inherited a doctor’s shop of great value, but that notwithstanding this he refused to dedicate himself to the medical profession.
The doctors’ shops were at the same time real pharmacies, where doctors prepared medicines, and where all the remedies then in use, either simple or compounded, were kept and sold to the public. Besides, there were to be found instruments of every kind and articles for medicating; and, therefore, bandages, compresses, lint, sponges, cupping glasses, cauteries, knives, bistouries, lancets, sounds, needles, hooks, pincers, files, saws, scrapers, splints, appliances for replacement of luxated bones, speculums, trepans, apparatus for fumigation, trusses, and a thousand things besides.
Naturally, dentistry was also practised in these shops, either by doctors who occupied themselves with dental maladies as with those of any other part of the body, or, later on, by individuals who dedicated themselves exclusively to this specialty.
Medicine and surgery were exercised, however, not only in doctors’ shops, but also at the patients’ houses, and it was Hippocrates who especially inaugurated clinical medicine—that is, the practice of visiting patients in their beds.
But we must not digress from our argument.
Many observations relative to the teeth are to be found in the seven books of Hippocrates on Epidemics. Unfortunately, the observations are not always given in clear and precise terms, which principally depends on the fact that these books consist for the most part of simple and most concise notes, written by Hippocrates on cases observed by him, and not intended for publication under such form, but rather constituting the material for further work.
Here is a passage from the fourth book on Epidemics, which reveals Hippocrates’ extraordinary power of observation, for even teeth that had fallen out were minutely examined by him, to the end of acquiring precise ideas on the anatomical conformation of these organs, held by him to be of the highest importance.