European and Asiatic Turkey. 259 



of practitioners is composed ; foreigners from all countries, and 

 of all trades, but chiefly Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, the re- 

 ligious orders of all the different forms of worship that are pro- 

 fessed in Turkey, besides gypsies, barbers, and old women. Of 

 the foreigners some are well educated, and a few, whose names 

 Dr O. mentions, are excellent surgeons and experienced physi- 

 cians, but such are " few and far between." It is a pity that 

 the state of medicine is so low in a country, where the inhabi- 

 tants esteem so highly the medical art, and where all are in- 

 clined to respect physicians ; by the Turks, a skilful physician 

 is almost ranked as a saint, and the appellation " Hekim," is 

 the surest protection against either religious or political persecu- 

 tion. In the last campaign against the Russians, often, says 

 Dr O., was the uplifted sword of the half barbarous Turk ar- 

 rested on the cry of " Hekim" being uttered by his vanquished 

 foe. The modern Greeks give the title of Excellency to the 

 physician, and old Homer estimated the value of a good surgeon 

 and physician very precisely, in saying that he was worth half- 

 a-dozen colonels * ! It may be here mentioned as a cunous 

 fact, that the formation of the immense empire of Great Britain 

 in the East Indies, was, in its infancy, greatly aided by the re- 

 spect entertained for the acquirements of an English physician 

 named Boughton, the successful exertion of whose medical skill 

 enabled him to obtain from the native princes, what the East 

 India Company had for forty years in vain struggled to possess, 

 the liberty to make a permanent settlement and build a factory. 

 There is a particular district of Greece called Sagor, in the 

 Paschalick of Janina, where the profession of medicine is, as it 

 were, the national characteristic and the chief occupation of the 

 inhabitants, whose right to practise is hereditary, and whose 

 knowledge consists in recipes and rules of treatment, handed 

 down from generation to generation. Three or four villages in 

 this district are complete medical hives, sending forth their an- 

 nual swarms of physicians, who spread themselves over the whole 

 of Macedonia, Albania, and Rumelia, and, in short, over the 

 whole Turkish empire. They follow the good old Greek fa- 



* It is difficult to assign tlieir proper rank to many of the chiefs and 

 minor heroes of the Iliad. In calling them colonels, I mean no offence to the 

 dead. '''''"^ 



