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PHYSICIANS AS THEY WERE, AND AS THEY ARE. 



No profession has undergone greater changes and vicissitudes than 

 physic. Its history presents it under various forms, in differert coun- 

 tries at different times, and in different places in the same country ; 

 almost universally respected by the great and good, it was equally 

 despised by the ignorant and vulgar. Of its antiquity, the earliest 

 records of the world afford abundant evidence. The Pagans considered 

 the gods as its inventors. In Egypt, the cradle of arts and science, its 

 invention was ascribed to Osiris ; from him it descended to Apollo, 

 from Apollo to Esculapius. Resting in the hands of priests, legislators, 

 and kings, the latter of whom frequently united in their own person 

 the spiritual functions of the priest with the temporal duties of king, it 

 was too frequently confounded with astrology. The first honourable 

 mention we find among the Greek, of any physician, is that of Melan- 

 thus, who received the hand and heart of his royal patient, the daughter 

 of King Prolus, whom he had cured of a mental affection. To the 

 philosophers and physicians of Greece we are indebted for the first 

 germs of that anatomical knowledge upon which Pythagoras, Demc-cri- 

 tus, Hippocrates, and Aristotle rested their systems. Of the principles 

 and doctrines of Pythagoras, we cannot speak with any degree of cer- 

 tainty at this distance of time, his works behig no longer extant ; but 

 if we may judge from the influence which his school exercised for many 

 years over Ancient Italy and Greece, supplying them with statesmen 

 and philosophers, it must have been great. To him we are indebted for 

 the doctrine of crisis, from which many useful indications in the treat- 

 ment of disease flow. Of Democritus, whose works have not escaped 

 the ravages of time, we can only say, that his genius is characterized 

 by his views ; the first to conceive the methodic system of the world 

 founded on the properties of matter and the laws of motion, and the 

 first to point to experiment as a new road to truth. To dwell upon the 

 merits of Hippocrates, a name that implies all that is great in medicine, 

 and good or amiable in man, would here be superfluous ; and of Aris- 

 totle we can say, that his knowledge of the moral and physical man was 

 most extensive. They were respected in proportion to their condition. 

 Darius had his physician, Democedes, always to dine with him ; Alex- 

 ander was equally partial to Phillip ; and we find that kings and princes 

 did not disdain to become the pupils of those great men. Pliny tells us 

 that the kings of Egypt prosecuted dissection to study disease ; ab regi- 

 bus quoque corpora mortuorum ad scrutandos morbos insecabantur. To 

 Juba, of Mauritania, we are indebted for some of the articles in our 

 materia medica ; to Mithridates, for the famed antidote, which, whether 

 it possess or not the virtues ascribed to it, is at least sufficient to prove 

 the dignity of the profession of old. That it had some claim to notice, 

 we may conclude, when we find the learning of Democritus, Galen, and 

 Celsus, engaged in attempts to explain its composition and properties. 

 Physicians were the friends and companions of the Roman Emperors, 

 Adrian, Vespasian, Antoninus, and Julian. Cicero and Pliny both say 

 that medicine was invented by the gods. Hippocrates says it was ars 

 artium nobilissima, but that the ignorance of pretenders has rendered it 

 omnium ignobalissima. From philosophy to medicine there is but one 

 step. The physician either ends or begins as a philosopher, was the 

 saying of that great man, Hippocrates. It was not the mere practice of 



