Greek Medicine 87 



His teaching led to a belief in the heart as the centre of the 

 vascular system and the chief organ of the ' pneuma ' which 

 was distributed by the blood vessels. This pneuma was 

 equivalent to both soul and life, but it was something more. 

 It was identified with air and breath, and the pneuma could 

 be seen to rise as shimmering steam from the shed blood of the 

 sacrificial victim for was not the blood its natural home? 

 There was a pneuma, too, that interpenetrated the universe 

 around us and gave it those qualities of life that it was felt to 

 possess. Anaximenes (c. 6io-c. 545 B.C.), an Ionian predecessor 

 of Empedocles, may be said to have defined for us these func- 

 tions of the pneuma ; olov 77 ^vy}] f] fjfJLtrcpa a??p owa rruyKparet 

 ?///a9, 6'Aoz; rbv KCKT^OV TTVv^a KOI arjp ire/ne'xei, ' As our soul, 

 being air, sustains us, so pneuma and air pervade the whole 

 universe'; 1 but it is the speculation of Empedocles himself 

 that came to be regarded as the basis of the Pneumatic School 

 in Medicine which had later very important developments. 



Another early member of the Western school who made 

 important contributions to medical doctrine in which relation 

 alone we need consider him was Pythagoras of Samos (c. 580- 

 c. 490 B.C.). For him number, as the purest conception, formed 

 the basis of philosophy. Unity was the symbol of perfection 

 and corresponded to God Himself. The material universe was 

 represented by 2, and was divided by the number 12, whence 

 we have 3 worlds and 4 spheres. These in turn, according at 

 least to the later Pythagoreans, give rise to the four elements, 

 earth, air, fire, and water a primary doctrine of medicine and 

 of science derived perhaps from ancient Egypt and surviving for 

 more than two millennia. The Pythagoreans taught, too, of the 

 existence of an animal soul, an emanation of the soul of the uni- 

 verse. In all this we may distinguish the germ of that doctrine 

 of the relation of man and universe, microcosm and macrocosm, 



1 The works of Anaximenes are lost. This phrase of his, however, is 

 preserved by the later writer Aetios. 



