Man and Microbes. 79 



was rapidly vanishing in the hg'ht of reason. It was in that 

 age that Pericles ruled Athens, that Socrates taught, Plato 

 wrote, and Phidias carved his statues. Then myth and fancy 

 began to give way to reality and fact. 



Hippocrates rationalized medicine so far as it was possible 

 in his time. He endeavored to eliminate all that was mystic, 

 all quackery. He gave origin to the theory of the four humors 

 of the body — blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Ac- 

 cording to him, disease was not due to the visitation of some 

 angered god, but to a disproportionate admixture of these 

 humors. A practical physician was Hippocrates, for he bled, 

 poulticed, dieted and purged his patients. He prescribed diets 

 and recommended fresh air. Further, he was truly scientific 

 in his bent, for he took up experimental study. Much of his 

 knowledge of digestion was attained through feeding certain 

 willing patients and then forcing them to vomit at definite 

 prescribed intervals. A keen observer was Hippocrates, and 

 some of the symptoms (Hippocratic facies) described by him 

 are recognized in present-day diagnosis. Honor is due him for 

 having prescribed the best code of conduct and morals that 

 a physician can adopt — the oath of Hippocrates. 



Time and space will permit us to name only the salient 

 features in the progress of medicine from the time of Hippo- 

 crates until that period which marks the discovery of the 

 various microbes of disease. Let us leap from one conspicuous 

 contributor to another. After Hippocrates came Aristotle, bet- 

 ter known for his philosophy than for his science. Then the 

 establishment, by Alexander the Great, of the great university 

 in Eg>'pt. Here, while Euclid demonstrated his propositions 

 and Ptolemy studied the moon, Erasistratus and Herophilus 

 carried on their dissections of the human body. 



IV. GALEN. 

 Later, we note the fall of the Alexandrian school in 414 A. D., 

 and the center of higher learning transposed back to Europe. 

 Rome became the center of the civilized world. Here appears 

 the second great apostle of medicine, Galen. He was a Greek 

 by birth, educated at Alexandria, and went to Rome, where the 

 highest intellectual agencies began to center. While Hip- 

 pocrates dominated medicine for a period of 500 years, Galen 

 was absolute authority in medical practice for more than a 

 thousand years. He was the first noted experimental physi- 



