HIPPOCRATES— GALEN— WHOLESOME FISH 279 



rid himself J Perhaps a secondary motive was not absent, 

 viz. the desire to avoid the taunt so often levehed at medical 

 men : 



dW(x)v tarpos auros e\K€<rLv ^pu€is> 



which Urquhart in his Rabelais translates, 



" He boasts of healing poor and rich, 

 Yet is himself all over itch ! " 



As regards fish as a diet in health and sickness, quot medici, 

 tot sententicB seems hardly exaggeration. Their wondrous 

 unanimity as regards the food-properties of the Eel amazes, 

 for with fish it was usually a case " where doctors disagree." 



The " Father of Medicine," in denouncing its use (especially 

 in pulmonary cases) was followed by nearly all medical writers, 

 some of whom, however, were not slow, when otherwise differing 

 from him, to assert that he killed more folk than he saved by 

 his practice of leaving Nature to effect its cure. Paulus 

 Jovius sums up historically the medical attitude towards 

 Eels : " abhorred in all places and at all times, all physicians 

 do detest them, especially about the solstice." 



As Galen's dictum 2 that fish afford the most desirable food 

 for " the idle, the old, the sick, and the silly " embraces the 

 majority — if we allow Carlyle's " mostly fools " — of mankind, 

 it would be idle to pursue the dietetic side, were it not for the 

 distingiws (to use the old Schoolman's term) as to which fishes 

 fell within or without the Mysian's category. 



Diphilus (with Philotimus and others) speaks disparagingly 

 of some, but highly recommends others. Habitat alone, he 

 urged, formed the deciding line between the clean and unclean. 

 His Treatise on Food for the Well and III ^ divides sea-fish into 

 (A) those which keep near the rocks — these, in his words, " are 

 easily digested, juicy, purgative, light, but not very nutritious " 

 — and (B) those which haunt deep water — these are " much 



* Empedocles, albeit no doctor, is said to have delivered Selinus in Sicily 

 from malaria by drainage, etc., and so roughly anticipated the triumphs of 

 Ross and Gorgas over the mosquito by some 2400 years. See Diog. Laert.' 

 VIII. 70, s.v. "Empedocles." 



2 De Alim. Fac, 3, 28. Cf. De Aitenuante victus rations, vol. vi. ed. 

 Chartier, which confirms and amplifies the above. 



' Athen., op. cit., VIII., chs. 51-56, which discuss various fishes from a 

 health point of view. 



