go SCIENCE IN GRECO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY 



medicine. As an anatomist, he is remarkable : he 

 distinguished between the nerves of sensation and 

 those of motion, a distinction which had never before 

 been made ; he accurately described the heart, and 

 recognized the importance of the brain, taking note of 

 its convolutions. But he still believed with Praxagoras 

 that the arteries contained air and not blood. If in 

 wounds the blood spurted from the arteries, it was 

 because there existed canals of communication between 

 the veins and the arteries, and the blood, being no 

 longer compressed by the air, passed from the former 

 into the latter, conformably to Strato's theory of 

 nature's abhorrence of a vacuum. The disciples of 

 Herophilus and Erasistratus soon fell into a dogmatism, 

 which brought about a reaction. A school arose called 

 the Empiric, which confined itself to purely descriptive 

 work and prohibited the inquiry into the general 

 causes of things. At Rome medicine for a long time 

 was in disfavour. Cato the Elder exhorted his son to 

 distrust the poisonous potions of the Greeks; he 

 recommended savoy cabbage as a remedy for all ills, 

 and healed fractured limbs by magic words. But with 

 the progress of civilization the need for physicians made 

 itself felt. So that when Asclepiades settled at Rome 

 in the first century B.C. he met with immediate success. 

 A native of Asia Minor, he was at first a rhetorician, 

 but attained such distinction as a physician that he 

 refused the offers of King Mithridates. He protested 

 against the abuse of drugs and purgatives, he exalted 

 the importance of hygiene and recommended cures by 

 water, massage and exercise. In this way, without 

 possessing very profound medical knowledge, he 

 exercised a happy influence. Theoretically he adopted 

 the humoral pathology of Hippocrates and completed 

 it by Epicurean atomism. In fact Hippocrates re- 

 mained the indisputable authority and his writings 

 had many commentators, amongst them, Apollonius 



