Greek Medicine 103 



been compared with modern psycho-analysis. That method, 

 like all methods, has doubtless been abused at times ; but it is 

 in essence, unlike the temple system, a purely scientific process 

 by which the ultimate basis of the patient's delusions are laid 

 bare and demonstrated to him. 



There is indeed another side to these Asclepian temples. 

 They gradually developed along the lines of our health resorts 

 and developed many of the qualities lovely and unlovely 

 that we associate with certain continental watering places. 

 On the bad side they became gossiping centres or even some- 

 thing little better than brothels, as we may gather from the 

 Mimes of Herondas. On the good side they formed a quiet 

 refuge among beautiful and interesting surroundings where the 

 sick, exhausted, and convalescent might gain the benefits that 

 accrue from pure air, fine scenery, and a regular and regulated 

 mode of life. It is more than probable too that the open air 

 and manner of living benefited many cases of incipient phthisis. 



Returning to the Hippocratic collection, the purely surgical 

 treatises will be found no less remarkable than those of clinical 

 observation. A very able surgeon, Francis Adams (1796-1861), 

 who was eminent as a Greek scholar, gave it as his opinion in 

 the middle of the nineteenth century that no systematic 

 writer on surgery up to his time had given so good and so 

 complete an account of certain dislocations, notably of the 

 hip-joint, as that to be found in the Hippocratic collection. 

 Some types of injury to the hip, as described in the Hippo- 

 cratic writings, were certainly otherwise quite inadequately 

 known until described by Sir Astley Cooper (1768-1841), 

 himself a peculiarly Hippocratic character. 1 The verdict of 

 Adams was probably just ; though since his time the surgery 

 of dislocations, aided especially by X-rays, has been enabled 



1 Astley Paston Cooper, Treatise on Dislocations and Fractures of tbe 

 Joints, London, 1822, and Observations on Fractures of tbe Neck and tbe 

 Thighbone, &c., London, 1823. 



