PHYSICIANS AND PHILOSOPHERS. 6n 



ago need be asked for than is offered by a comparison of the average 

 length of human life as given by Herodotus and that currently ac- 

 cepted until quite recently — three generations to a century. In fact 

 most life insurance associations have not yet learned that this average 

 is above forty years. Anatomy had made great progress and the struc- 

 ture of the body was minutely known, but until the germ theory of 

 disease and antisepsis were established, therapeutics was largely a 

 matter of tradition and routine; of empiricism and individual skill. 

 When one reads of the incessant wars that kept a portion of the male 

 inhabitants constantly occupied in military enterprises, directly or in- 

 directly, one is inclined to believe that the average of human life must 

 have been shorter than it was held to be twenty or twenty-three cen- 

 turies ago. There is no room to enter upon a discussion of the problem 

 here; suffice it to say, the loss from disease was probably no greater, 

 and the losses in the armies probably much less relatively than in 

 modern times. For it is well known that the killed in battle are but 

 a small portion of those whom war deprives of life. It is probable 

 that never before or since has any country suffered such ravages as 

 did Germany during what is called the thirty years war. That the 

 sanitary condition of ancient Greece must for the most part have been 

 fairly good is attested by the rapid recuperation of most of the city- 

 states after a disastrous war. But then there were no large cities 

 like those of modern times, in which the population increases much 

 faster than the adoption and enforcement of sanitary measures. 



It will hardly be considered surprising that disease in any form 

 should early have stimulated men to reflection. This is true at least 

 of those living under conditions where there was more or less freedom 

 of action and where affairs had not vet settled down into the lethal 



%i 



routine that characterized the social life of most of the people of the 

 ancient world anterior to the appearance of the Greeks. The succes- 

 sion of day and night; the changes of season that follow each other 

 regularly, and the meteorological conditions that accompany them, 

 would be taken as a matter of course. But the vicissitudes of the 

 human system, whether gradual, rapid or sudden, when not the result 

 of accident or attributed to the malevolence of evil spirits, naturally 

 led to inquiry as to their causes. The next step was in quest of 

 prophylactics and curatives. This sort of reasoning, of philosophy, 

 was not obnoxious to the charge that Socrates brought against the 

 philosophy of his day, namely, that it was concerned wholly with things 

 that were of no benefit to any one and with problems to which no 

 answer could be found. 



It will scarcely be denied by those best qualified to judge that of 

 the three learned professions that of medicine is still the best fitted 

 to stimulate thought and investigation. It is less hemmed in by tra- 



