84 Greek Medicine 



owe a debt. 1 Omitting, therefore, this early epoch, we pass 

 direct to the later period, between the sixth and fourth cen- 

 turies, from which documents have actually come down to us. 



The earliest medical school of which we have definite 

 information is tha.t of Cnidus, a Lacedaemonian colony in 

 Asiatic Doris. Its origin may perhaps reach back to the seventh 

 century B. c. We have actual records that the teachers of 

 Cnidus were accustomed to collect systematically the pheno- 

 mena of disease, of which they had produced a very complex 

 classification, and we probably possess also several of their 

 actual works. The physicians of Cos, their only contemporary 

 critics whose writings have survived, considered that the 

 Cnidian physicians paid too much attention to the actual 

 sensations of the patient and to the physical signs of the 

 disease. The most important of the Cnidian doctrines were 

 drawn up in a series of Sentences or Aphorisms, and these, it 

 appears, inculcated a treatment along Egyptian lines of the 

 symptom or at most the disease, rather than the patient, 

 a statement borne out by the contents of the gynaecological 

 works of probable Cnidian origin included in the so-called 

 ' Hippocratic Collection '. A few names of Cnidian physicians 

 have, moreover, come down to us with titles of their works, and 

 a later statement that they practised anatomy. There can be 

 little doubt too that the Cnidian school drew also on Persian 

 and Indian Medicine. 



The origin of the school of the neighbouring island of Cos 

 was a little later than that of Cnidus and probably dates from 

 the sixth century B. c. Of the Coan school, or at least of the 

 general tendencies that it represented, we have a magnificent 

 and copious literary monument in the Corpus Hippocraticum, 

 a collection which was probably put together in the early part 

 of the third century B. c. by a commission of Alexandrian 



1 It is tempting, also, to connect the Asclepian snake cult with the promi- 

 nence of the serpent in Minoan religion. 



