Greek Medicine 113 



dimly aware of the existence, of infection. 1 For them acute 

 disease was something imposed on the patient from outside, 

 but how it reached him from outside and what it was that 

 thus reached him they were still admittedly ignorant. In this 

 dilenima they turned to prolonged observation and noted as 

 a result of repeated experience that epidemic diseases in their 

 world had characteristic seasonal and regional distributions. 

 One country was not quite like another, nor was one season 

 like another nor even one year like another. By a series of 

 carefully collated observations as to how regions, seasons, and 

 years differed from each other, they succeeded in laying the basis 

 of a rational study of epidemiology which gave rise to the 

 notion of an ' epidemic constitution ' of the different years, a 

 conception which was very fertile and stimulating to the great 

 clinicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is by 

 no means without value even for the modern epidemiologist. 

 The work of the modern fathers of epidemiology was con- 

 sciously based on Hippocrates. 



Before parting with the Hippocratic physician a word must 

 be said as to his therapeutic means. His general armoury may 

 be described as resembling that of the modern physician of 

 about two generations ago. During those two generations we 

 have, it is true, added to our list of effective remedies but, on 

 the other hand, there has been by common consent a return 



The ancients knew almost nothing of infection as applied specifically to 

 disease. All early peo'ples including Greeks and Romans believed in the 

 transmission of qualities from object to object. Thus purity and impurity 

 and good and bad luck were infections, and diseases were held to be infec- 

 tions in that sense. But there is little evidence in the belief of the special 

 infectivity of disease as such in antiquity. Some few diseases are, however, 

 unequivocally referred to as infectious in a limited number of passages, 

 e.g. ophthalmia, scabies, and phthisis in the Tif/ji duxfropas Kvperwv, On the 

 differentiae of fevers, K. vii, p. 279. The references to infection in antiquity 

 are detailed by C. and D. Singer, ' The scientific position of Girolamo 

 Fracastoro', Annals of Medical History, vol. i, New York, 1917. 

 2540.1 H 



