PHYSICIANS AND PHILOSOPHERS. 613 



seized him and lie became so weak that he could hardly walk. As 

 soon as he could get back to his medicine-chest he looked at his bottles 

 again, when, to his great joy and greater relief, he found that he had 

 taken just what he intended. The man declared afterwards that he 

 believed he would have died if he had not had the means of ascertain- 

 ing the facts in the case. 



Though the ancients knew little of the structure of the nerves, they 

 were well aware of the influence of the imagination as a therapeutic 

 agency. The walls of many of their temples were covered with tablets 

 and votive offerings in testimony of gratitude to the god by whom the 

 sick were healed. Faith-cures and christian science are therefore by 

 no means a new thing under the sun, but something very old under 

 new names. Though the ancients rarely, or not at all, dissected hu- 

 man bodies, they had a fairly definite knowledge of anatomy derived 

 from the inspection of brutes. The bony structure could be readily 

 studied with the aid of the skeletons that were plentiful enough in 

 countries dotted with battlefields. The Persian invasion alone prob- 

 ably left tens of thousands of corpses strewn along the retreat of the 

 great king. The aversion to the dissection of cadavers that was felt by 

 many of the Greeks seems to have been connected with their reverence 

 for the human form. It was regarded as a sacrilege to mutilate even a 

 corpse. The treatment which the dead body of Leonidas received at 

 the hands of Xerxes was due, as Herodotus expressly informs us, to the 

 extraordinary exasperation he felt against the Spartan king for his 

 fierce resistance to the Persian advance. Though Achilles had dragged 

 the dead body of Hector many times around the walls of Troy, yet 

 Apollo preserved it uninjured. This reverence for the ' human form 

 divine,' like many other superstitions, interfered seriously with the 

 progress of science. The favorite gods, Zeus and Apollo, were repre- 

 sented as physically perfect men. The effects of this sentiment are 

 especially evident in the manner by which those condemned to death 

 were executed. There seems to be no other explanation of the singular 

 custom of administering the hemlock juice than the desire to leave the 

 body after death as nearly as possible as it appeared in its living state. 

 That the rule was departed from under special circumstances and in 

 times of great excitement is no valid argument against the correctness 

 of the explanation. 



According to Homer and Herodotus, the healing art was discovered 

 or invented in Egypt. The Odyssey tells us that there every man is 

 a physician skilled beyond human kind. Mention is also made of the 

 many plants possessing medicinal properties. Oculists are said to 

 have been particularly numerous, and many prescriptions for diseases 

 of the eye have been found among the papyri. Artificial and gold- 

 filled teeth have also been met with both in Egypt and in Etrurian 



