Volume 1

A system of medicine by eminent authorities in Great Britain, the United States and the Continent / edited by William Osler, assisted by Thomas McCrae.

Date:
1907-10
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A system of medicine by eminent authorities in Great Britain, the United States and the Continent / edited by William Osler, assisted by Thomas McCrae. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    were those of Cos, Cnidos, Epidaurus, Croton, Cyrene and Rliodes. Tlie elaborate ritual of the cure is well described in the Plutus of Aristophanes. Real cures were often effected and the inscri]jtions tell of the touching and simple faith which, then as now, forms so impor- tant a factor in the healing of many diseases. In other cases change of air and scene, the baths, and massage effected a cure. Hypnotism (?), diet, gymnastic exercises, and games formed ]>art of the treatment. In dreams which came in the “temple sleep” the god indicated the special treatment to be carried out. These tcmjdes were really sacred sanatoria situate in beautiful localities and greatly resorted to by people of all classes. At first they appear to have had close associations with the secular medicine of the day and to have represented depositories of empirical knowledge, but later they become hot-beds of jugglery and deception. Scientific medicine, the product of a union of religion with philosophy, had its origin in a remarkable conjunction of gifts and conditions among the Greeks in the fifth and sixth centuries. “There was the teeming wealth of constructive imagination united with the sleepless, critical spirit which shrank from no test of authority; there was the most powerful impulse to generalization coupled with the sharpest faculty for descrying and distinguishing the finest shades of phenomenal peculiarity; there was the religion of Hellas, which afforded complete satisfaction to the requirements of sentiment, and yet left the Intelligence free to perform its destructive work; there were the political conditions of a number of rival centres of intellect, of a friction of forces excluding the possibility of stagnation, and, finally, of an order of state and society strict enough to curb the exce.sses of ‘children crying for the moon,’ and elastic enough not to hamper the soaring flight of superior minds. We have already made acquaintance with two of the sources from which the spirit of criticism derived its nourishment, the metaphysical and dialectical discussions practised by the Eleatic philosophers and the semi-historical method which was. applied to the myths by IlecatiTus and Herodotus. A third source is to be traced to the schools of the j^hysicians. These aimed at eliminating the arbitrary element from the view and knowledge of nature, the beginnings of which were bound up with it in a greater or less degree, though practically without exception and by the force of an inner necessity. A knowledge of medicine was destined to correct that defect, and we shall mark the growth of its most precious fruits in the increased jwwer of observation and the counterpoise it offered to hasty generalizations, as well as in the confidence which learned to reject unten- able fictions, whether produced by luxuriant imagination or by a priori speculations, on the similar ground of self-reliant sense perception.”^ Greek medicine did not originate with Hippocrates, who in reality represents to us the embodiment of a period in which he only forms the most striking figure. As he remarks in the book On Ancient Medicine, “but all these requisites belong of old to medicine, and an origin and way have been found out by which many and elegant discoveries have been made during a length of time, and others will yet be found out, if a person possessed of the proj)cr ability, and Icnowing these discoveries ‘ Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. i.