278 FISH IN MYTHS, SYMBOLS, DIET, MEDICINE 



One lemma " Pingit et delectat " is not the author's happiest 

 effort. That attached to the only ilkistration of a man fishing 

 — Tenet et tenetur — tersely depicts the happy angler. 



Many instances illustrating the importance attached to 

 fish, both in diet and in medicine, are to be found scattered 

 through my pages. I would, however, wager that in addition 

 to these multiphed even one thousandfold, there would yet 

 remain in the pages of medical ^ and other writers (even if we 

 stop as early as Aetius) matter sufficient for a large Monograph. 2 



In one book alone of Pliny's (XXXII.) fish are recommended 

 as remedies, internal or external, no less than (according to 

 my rough reckoning) 342 times ! 



If Hippocrates, " the father of Medicine," in the fifth 

 century B.C. (c. 460-359) laid the foundation, Galen some 

 six centuries later (131-201 a.d.) crowned the edifice of that 

 science. The cry and the practice of the former, " Back to 

 Nature," was energetically enjoined and brilliantly defended 

 against the inevitable reactions of the Alexandrian and other 

 schools by the latter, who acclaims his predecessor as " divine." 



In his insistent teaching " Ensue Health," as the one and 

 only thing alike for patients and physicians, Galen ^ might 

 well have adopted the last line of Ariphron's glorious paean 

 to Health : 



/i€Ta aeio, fiaKaip Yytcia, 



riOaXe TrdvTa koX Xajxiru Xapircov tapi 



In his own case success crowned his efforts. He boldly 

 boasts that he did not desire to be esteemed a physician, if 

 from his twenty-eighth year to old age he had not lived m 

 perfect health, except for some slight fevers, of which he soon 



* To Galen alone 149 works are attributed. 



* For a list of practitioners, medical authors, and quacks before Pliny, 

 and the enormous fees sometimes paid them, see A^^. H., XXIX. i, 7. Not 

 inappropriate, and probably not infrequent, when we read of their number 

 and their disagreements, was the epitaph — Turba se medicorum perisse. This 

 attribution of death to too many doctors is accredited to Hadrian, but is 

 probably a Latin adaptation of Menander's iroWoiv iarpSiv iXaoZos fx ainiXeaev. 



^ It is with some surprise that we read of Galen being one of the original 

 DeipnosophistcB (I. 2), and with more still that we find the omnivorous and 

 omniscient Athenasus quoting but once from this most prolific author, and 

 that a passage which lays down, let us trust from the experience of his patients 

 that Falernian wine over twenty years old causes headaches. 



