798 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pheiiomcnoil must needs have a physical cause was not tlie implied or 

 expressed axiom that it is to us moderns. 



The great man whose name is inseparably connected with the foun- 

 dation of medicine, Hippocrates, certainly knew very little, indeed 

 practically nothing, of anatomy or physiology ; and he would proba- 

 bly have been perplexed even to imagine the possibility of a connec- 

 tion between the zoological studies of his contemporary, Democritus, 

 and medicine. Nevertheless, in so far as he, and those who w^orked 

 before and after him in the same spirit, ascertained, as matters of ex- 

 perience, that a wound, or a luxation, or a fever, presented such and 

 such symptoms, and that the return of the patient to health was facili- 

 tated by such and such measures, they established laws of nature, and 

 began the construction of the science of pathology. All true science 

 begins with empiricism though all true science is such exactly, in so 

 far as it strives to pass out of the empirical stage into that of the de- 

 duction of empirical from more general truths. Thus, it is not won- 

 derful that the early physicians had little or nothing to do with the 

 development of biological science ; and, on the other hand, that the 

 early biologists did not much concern themselves with medicine. There 

 is nothing to show that the Asclepiads took any prominent share in 

 the work of founding anatomy, physiology, zoology, and botany. 

 Rather do these seem to have sprung from the early philosophers, who 

 were essentially natural philosophers, animated by the characteristi- 

 cally Greek thirst for knowledge as such. Pythagoras, Alcmeon, De- 

 mocritus, Diogenes of Apollonia, are all credited with anatomical and 

 physiological investigation ; and though. Aristotle is said to have be- 

 longed to an Asclepiad family, and not improbably owed his taste for 

 anatomical and zoological inquiries to the teachings of his father, the 

 physician Nicomachus, the "Historia Animalium," and the treatise 

 " De Partibus Animalium," are as free from any allusion to medicine 

 as if they had issued from a modern biological laboratory. 



It may be added that it is not easy to see in what way it could 

 have benefited a physician of Alexander's time to know all that Aris- 

 totle knew on these subjects. His human anatomy was too rough to 

 avail much in diagnosis, his physiology was too erroneous to supply 

 data for pathological reasoning. But when the Alexandrian schools, 

 with Erasistratus and Herophilus at their head, turned to account the 

 opportunities for studying human structure, afforded to them by the 

 Ptolemies, the value of the large amount of accurate knowledge thus 

 obtained to the surgeon for his operations, and to the physician for his 

 diagnosis of internal disorders, became obvious, and a connection was 

 established between anatomy and medicine, which has ever become 

 closer and closer. Since the revival of learning, surgery, medical di- 

 agnosis, and anatomy have gone hand in hand. Morgagni called his 

 great work, " De sedibus et causis morborum per anatomen indagatis," 

 and not only showed the way to search out the localities and the 



