82 Greek Medicine 



geographical and economic position and in general outlook, the 

 practice of medicine can have been by no means uniform. Without 

 any method of centralizing medical education and standardizing 

 teaching there was a great variety of doctrines and of practice 

 in vogue among them, and much of this was on a low level 

 of folk custom. Such lower grade material of Greek origin 

 has come down to us in abundance, though much of it, curiously 

 enough, from a later time. But the overwhelming mass of 

 earlier Greek medical literature sets forth for us a pure scientific 

 effort to observe and to classify disease, to make generalizations 

 from carefully collected data, to explain the origin of disease 

 on rational grounds, and to apply remedies, when possible, 

 on a reasoned basis. We may thus rest fairly well assured that, 

 despite serious and irreparable losses, we are still in possession 

 of some of the very finest products of the Greek medical 

 intellect. 



There is ample evidence that the Greeks inherited, in 

 common with many other peoples of Mediterranean and 

 Asiatic origin, a whole system of magical or at least non- 

 rational pharmacy and medicine from a remoter ancestry. 

 Striking parallels can be drawn between these folk elements 

 among the Greeks and the medical systems of the early Romans, 

 as well as with the medicine of the Indian Vedas, of the ancient 

 Egyptians, and of the earliest European barbarian writings. It 

 is thus reasonable to suppose that these elements, when they 

 appear in later Greek writings, represent more primitive folk 

 elements working up, under the influence of social disintegra- 

 tion and consequent mental deterioration, through the upper 

 strata of the literate Greek world. But with these elements, 

 intensely interesting to the anthropologist, the psychologist, 

 the ethnologist, and to the historian of religion, we are not 

 here greatly concerned. Important as they are, they consti- 

 tute no part of the special claim of the Greek people to dis- 

 tinction, but rather aid us in uniting the Greek mentality 



