The hydropathic encyclopedia : a system of hydropathy and hygiene in eight parts ... designed as a guide to families and students, and a text-book for physicians / by R. T. Trall, M.D.

  • Russell Trall
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hydropathic encyclopedia : a system of hydropathy and hygiene in eight parts ... designed as a guide to families and students, and a text-book for physicians / by R. T. Trall, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    connected with medicine. In the formation of opinions he was entirely independent, paying very littla respect to authority; and so great, was the reputation he acquired for learning, skill, and wisdom, that his. opinions were regarded by many as oracles. In theory he was with the Dogmatists, and in practice he professed to venerate and act upon the principles of Hippocrates. In Galen's time the Roman empire began to decline; and the gene- ral decay of science and literature in the middle ages succeeding, has left, little to record in the shape of innovation. Sprenzel has pithily characterized the medical writers of the third and fourth centuries as frigid compilers, or blind empirics, or feeble imitators of the physician of Pergamus. Oribasius, who lived in the fourth century, Aetius in the fifth, and Alexander Trallianus and Paulus .ZEgina in the sixth, wrote book3 which professed but little more than to be compilations of, and commentaries on, the works of Galen * The Arabian School.—With the death of Paulus, about the mid- dle of the seventh century, terminated the Greek school of medicine. The Arabians, who conquered a large portion of the semi-civilized world, destroyed the immense Alexandrian library, yet the Arabian phy- sicians had adopted the opinions of Galen, and followed his practice im- plicitly. But a new school soon arose among them, owing to the inven- tion of chemistry, and its being made subservient to medicine. One of the most celebrated Arabian ] hysicians was Rhazes, born at Irak, in Persia, in the ninth century. His writings, though mostly comments on Galen and the Greek physicians, contain an original and elaborate treatise on the theory and treatment of small-pox and measles. In his writings on surgery and pharmacy are found indications of the em- ployment of chemical remedies, which formed so important and so dis- astrous an era in medical history soon after. After Rhazes flourished Ali Abbas, a physician and writer, who ob- tained the title of magician; and about a century later appeared on the stage Avicenna, who acquired a reputation among his countrymen not inferior to that of Galen. He was born at Bokhara, a.d. 980, and was carefully educated in the schools of Bagdat. His published works were numerous and his Canon Medicinal, n kind of encyclopaedia of ex- isting medical sciences, was the text-book in most of the Arabian, and even European, schools for several centuries. Mesue the elder, Mesne the younger, and Albucasis were among the last Arabians of distinction who wrote much on medical subjects. Avenzoar, and his pupil Averroes, natives of Spain, wrote voluminously