Greek Medicine 



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the works of four important writers of this century, of whom 

 three, Rufus of Ephesus, Soranus of Ephesus, and Aretaeus of 

 Cappadocia, though valuable for forming a picture of the state 

 of medicine in their day, were without substantial influence on 

 the course of medicine in later ages. 



Rufus of Ephesus, a little junior to Dioscorides, has left us 

 the first formal work on human anatomy and is of some im- 

 portance in the history of comparative anatomy. In medicine 

 he is memorable as the first to have described bubonic plague, 

 and in surgery for his description of the methods of arresting 

 haemorrhage and his knowledge of the anatomy of the eye. 

 A work by him On gout was translated into Latin in the sixth 

 century, but remained unknown till modern times. 



Soranus of Ephesus (A. D. c. go-c. 150), an acute writer on 

 gynaecology, has left a book which illustrates well the anatomy 

 of his day. It exercised an influence for many centuries to 

 come, and a Latin abstract of it prepared about the sixth 

 century by one Mbschion has come down to us in an almost 

 contemporary manuscript. 1 It is interesting as opposing the 

 Hippocratic theory that the male embryo is originated in the 

 right and the female in the left half of the womb, a fallacy 

 derived originally from Empedocles and Parmenides, but 

 perpetuated by Latin translations of the Hippocratic treatises 

 until the seventeenth century. His work was adorned by 

 figures, and some of these, naturally greatly altered by copyists, 

 but still not infinitely removed from the facts, have survived 

 in a manuscript of the ninth century, and give us a distant 

 idea of the appearance of ancient anatomical drawings. 2 We 

 may assist our imagination a little further, in forming an idea 

 of what such diagrams were like, with the help of certain other 



1 Leyden Voss 4 9* of the sixth century is a fragment of this work. 



2 V. Rose, Sorani Ephesiivetus translatio Latino, cum additis Graeci textus 

 reliquiis, Leipzig, 1882; F. Weindler, Geschicbte der gyniikologiscb-anato- 

 mischen Abbildung, Dresden, 1908. 



