6o8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



PHYSICIANS AND PHILOSOPHERS. 



By Peofessor CHARLES WILLIAM SUPER, 



OHIO UNIVERSITY. 



ALTHOUGH the initial assonance of physician with philosopher 

 is purely accidental, it is nevertheless a fact that philosophy 

 and the healing art or medical science have been closely associated with 

 each other from their earliest beginnings. It can not but be regarded 

 as a singular coincidence that for two and a half millenniums physic 

 and philosophy, the practitioners of the healing art and the real or 

 professed lovers of knowledge, have been more or less intimate friends. 

 At the beginning they seem to have found themselves in each other's 

 company almost by chance; then by a sort of elective affinity like that 

 which often springs up between persons of opposite sex whose paths 

 in the ordinary course of events incidentally crossed each other, to 

 have discovered that they could make the rest of the journey together 

 to reciprocal advantage. 



Herodotus, the Father of History, was a native of Halicarnassus, 

 and Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, his younger contemporary, 

 first saw the light on the island of Kos, only a few leagues distant. 

 Born in the same year with Hippocrates was the philosopher Diogenes, 

 of Apollonia in Crete, whose few literary remains not only attest his 

 interest in human anatomy, but also furnish proof that he early came 

 under the influence of the Ionian thinkers. Though never regarded 

 as a physician, but only as a philosopher, he tells us in one of the very 

 brief fragments that have been preserved that the veins of the human 

 body are divided into two branches; that they pass through the ab- 

 dominal cavity along the backbone, one on the right side, the other 

 on the left, into the legs ; and that two branches pass into the head. He 

 then goes on to describe the course of the blood vessels and their rami- 

 fications as far as the ends of the toes, the fingers, and so on. It may 

 safely be assumed from this fragment that Diogenes gave much atten- 

 tion to the structure of the human body. 



In the southwestern portions of Asia Minor, the disciples of 

 Asclepias or iEsculapius had several therapeutic establishments, and 

 it is in connection with these that we discover the first signs of what 

 may be called the healing art in the entire ancient world. 



It was especially the priests of the temples of Kos and Knidos who 

 cultivated a primitive and simple medical science in connection with 



