Greek Medicine 83 



with that of other kindred peoples. Here we shall rather 

 discuss the course of Greek scientific medicine proper, the 

 type of medical doctrine and practice, capable of development 

 in the proper sense of the word, that forms the basis of our 

 modern system. We are concerned, in fact, with the earliest 

 evolutionary medicine. 



We need hardly discuss the first origins of Greek Medicine. 

 The material is scanty and the conclusions somewhat doubtful 

 and perhaps premature, for the discovery of a considerable 

 fragment of the historical work of Menon, a pupil of Aristotle, 

 containing a description of the views of some of the precursors 

 of the Hippocratic school, renews a hope that more extended 

 investigation may yield further information as to the sources 

 and nature of the earliest Greek medical writings. 1 The study 

 of Mesopotamian star-lore has linked it up with early Greek 

 astronomical science. The efforts of cuneiform scholars have 

 not, how r ever, been equally successful for medicine, and on the 

 whole the general tendency of modern research is to give less 

 weight to Mesopotamian and more to Egyptian sources than had 

 previously been admitted ; thus, as an instance, some prescrip- 

 tions in the Ebers papyrus of the eighteenth dynasty (about the 

 sixteenth century B.C.) discovered at Thebes in 1872 resemble 

 certain formulae in the Corpus Hippocraticum. A number of 

 drugs, too, habitually used by the Greeks, such as Andropogon. 

 Cardamoms, and Sesame orientalis, are of Indian origin. There 

 are also the Minoan cultures to be considered, and our know- 

 ledge is not yet sufficient to speak of the heritage that Greek 

 medicine may or may not have derived from that source, 

 though it seems not improbable that Greek hygiene may here 



1 This fragment has been published in vol. iii, part i, of the Supple- 

 mentum Aristolelicum by H. Diels as Anonymi Londinensis ex Aristotelis 

 latricis Menonis et Aliis Medicis Eclogae, Berlin, 1893. See also H. Bekh 

 and F. Spat, Anonymus Londinensis^ Ausziige eines Unbekannten aus Arts- 

 toteles-Menons Handbucb der Medizin, Berlin, 1896. 



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