Greek Medicine 81 



from late Greek times which was hardly, if at all, superior to 

 the debased compositions that circulated in the name of 

 medicine in the middle centuries. But the recovered Greek 

 medical writings also contained some material of the purest and 

 most scientific type, and that material and the spirit in which 

 it was written, form the debt of modern medicine to antiquity. 



It is a debt the value of which cannot be exaggerated. The 

 physicians of the revival of learning, and for long after, doubt- 

 less pinned their faith too much to the written word of their 

 Greek forbears and sought to imprison the free spirit of Hippo- 

 crates and Galen in the rigid wall of their own rediscovered texts. 

 The great medical pioneers of a somewhat later age, enraged 

 by this attempt, the real nature of which was largely hidden 

 from them, not infrequently revolted and rightly revolted 

 against the bondage to the Greeks in which they had been 

 brought up. Yet it is sure that these modern discoverers were 

 the true inheritors of the Greeks. Without Herophilus we 

 should have had no Harvey and the rise of physiology might 

 have been delayed for centuries ; had Galen's works not 

 survived, Vesalius would never have reconstructed Anatomy, 

 and Surgery too might have stayed behind with her laggard 

 sister, Medicine ; the Hippocratic collection was the necessary 

 and acknowledged basis for the work of the greatest of modern 

 clinical observers, Thomas Sydenham, and the teaching of 

 Hippocrates and of his school is the substantial basis of instruc- 

 tion in the wards of a modern hospital. In the pages which 

 follow we propose therefore to review the general character 

 of medical knowledge in the best Greek period and to consider 

 briefly how much of that great heritage remained accessible to 

 the earlier modern physicians. The reader will thus be able 

 to form some estimate of the degree to which the legacy has 

 been passed on to our own times. 



It is evident that among such a group of peoples as the 



Greeks, varying in state of civilization, in mental power, in 

 2540.1 F 



