Greek Medicine 115 



them except, we may note, in the works on the treatment of 

 women, which are probably of Cnidian origin and whence 

 the greater part of the 300 constituents of the Hippocratic 

 pharmacopoeia are derived. Thus his list of drugs is small, 

 but several known to him are still used by us. 



The work of these men may be summed up by saying that 

 without dissection, without any experimental physiology or 

 pathology, and without any instrumental aid they pushed the 

 knowledge of the course and origin of disease as far as it is 

 conceivable that men in such circumstances could push it. 

 This was done as a process of pure scientific induction. Their 

 surgery, though hardly based on anatomy, was grounded on 

 the most carefully recorded experience. In therapeutics they 

 allowed themselves neither to be deceived by false hopes nor 

 led aside by vain traditions. Yet in diagnosis, prognosis, 

 surgery and therapeutics alike they were in many departments 

 unsurpassed until the nineteenth century, and to some of 

 their methods we have reverted in the twentieth. Persisting 

 throughout the ages as a more or less definite tradition, which 

 attained clearer form during and after the sixteenth century, 

 Hippocratic methods have formed the basis of all departments 

 of modern advance. 



But the history of Greek medicine did not end with the 

 Hippocratic collection ; in many respects it may indeed be 

 held only to begin there ; yet we never get again a glimpse of 

 so high an ethical and professional standard as that which these 

 works convey. From Alexandrian times onwards, too, the 

 history of Greek medicine becomes largely a history of various 

 schools of medical thought, each of which has only a partial 

 view of the course and nature of medical knowledge. The 

 unravelling of the course and teachings of these sects has 

 long been a pre-occupation of professed medical historians, 

 but the general reader can hardly take an interest in dif- 

 ferences between the Dogmatists, Empirics, and Methodists 



H 2 



