90 Greek Medicine 



sons Thessalus and Dracon, who also undertook journeys, his 

 son-in-law Polybus, of whose works a fragment has been pre- 

 erved for us by Aristotle, 1 together with three other Coans 

 bearing the names Apollonius, Dexippus, and Praxagoras. This 

 is practically all we know of him with certainty. But though 

 this glimp,se is very dim and distant, yet we cannot exaggerate 

 the influence on the course of medicine and the value for 

 physicians of all time of the traditional picture that was early 

 formed of him and that may indeed well be drawn again from 

 the works bearing his name. In beauty and dignity that figure 

 is beyond praise. Perhaps gaining in stateliness what he loses 

 in clearness, Hippocrates will ever remain the type of the perfect 

 physician. Learned, observant, humane, with a profound 

 reverence for the claims of his patients, but an overmastering 

 desire that his experience shall benefit others, orderly and calm, 

 disturbed only by anxiety to record his knowledge for the use 

 of his brother physicians and for the relief of suffering, grave, 

 thoughtful and reticent, pure of mind and master of his passions, 

 this is no overdrawn picture of the Father of Medicine as he 

 appeared to his contemporaries and successors. It is a figure of 

 character and virtue which has had an ethical value to medical 

 men of all ages comparable only to the influence exerted on 

 their followers by the founders of the great religions. If one 

 needed a maxim to place upon the statue of Hippocrates, none 

 could be found better than that from the book 

 Precepts : 



rjv yap Traprj (piXavOpovniri irdptcrn KCLI 

 4 Where the love of man is, there also is love of the Art.' 2 

 The numerous busts of him which have reached our time 



1 Historia animalium^ iii. 3, where it is ascribed to Polybus. The same 

 passage is, however, repeated twice in the Hippocratic writings, viz. in the 



i (puo-io? di>0po>7rou, On the nature of ?nan, Littre, vi. 58, and in the 

 t oare'toi/ (pt'o-ios 1 , On the nature of bones, Littre, ix. 174. 



2 Ilapn-yyfXt'fU, 6. 



