586 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



doubtless strengthened the arms and legs of the criminal, but it wa3 

 without profit to anybody. After the writings of Aristotle became 

 known in western Europe they were accepted as the final word upon 

 every subject on which the Stagirite had expressed himself. Yet he 

 would have been the first man to protest against such a misuse of his 

 books. Far more intellectual ingenuity was expended in trying to prove 

 that they were true than in investigating to what extent they were true. 

 If there is a subject that intimately concerns every man, woman and 

 child, it is the healing art. And it has always been the same. Yet so 

 thoroughly convinced were the minds of the medical fraternity that 

 Galen had spoken the last word upon their profession, that until the 

 beginning of the modern era he had the whole field to himself. When 

 John Locke was in Montpellier he attended the ceremony of conferring 

 the degree of doctor of medicine upon a candidate. Part of it consisted 

 in an address by the head of the faculty which in this case was almost 

 wholly taken up with a diatribe against Harvey's theory of the circula- 

 tion of the blood. 



The history of medicine illustrates in a striking way the tendency 

 of the himian mind to stagnate and dogmatize, and demonstrates how 

 an art eventually becomes impregnated with the scientific spirit. The 

 infancy of medical science falls in the middle of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury; it is therefore not three hundred years old. In the Iliad physi- 

 cians are held in great esteem by the Greeks. Herodotus tells us that 

 the medical art was highly specialized in ancient Egypt and that there 

 were physicians for almost every part of the body. Embalmers were 

 also classed among physicians, for we are told in Genesis that Joseph 

 commanded the physicians to embalm the body of his father. That 

 there were practising physicians in Palestine at an early period is evi- 

 dent from a few passages in the Old Testament. When we reflect that 

 the ancient Greeks were almost continually at war either with barbarians 

 or among themselves, it seems incredible that their books tell us almost 

 nothing about the care of the sick and wounded in their armies. 

 Xenophon relates that once during the retreat of the Ten Thousand, 

 after a particularly severe conflict with the enemy, the officers found it 

 necessary to appoint eight physicians because there were many wounded. 

 If he had said "additional" we should suppose that the number of 

 those whose duty it was to attend to the disabled was insufficient. The 

 passage clearly conveys the meaning that there had been no previous 

 provision for an organization corresponding to the modern ambulance 

 corps. It is doubtful if the ancient Greek language contains a word 

 corresponding to our "hospital." Hippocrates did not dogmatize, for 

 the reason that he was one of the world's really great men. But some 

 of his pupils founded the Dogmatic school; and while they made a few 

 discoveries, their system was vitiated by philosophical theorems and 



