MEDICAMENTS AND LIFE. 205 



ception, practised skill, and watchful diligence, from the 

 inexhaustible resources of science. It is his to seize upon 

 slight hints, and, with intuitive judgment, to refer the con- 

 fused and irregular group of symptoms to the well-ascer- 

 tained mechanism which only can explain them. He will 

 perform this task the more easily and the more successfully, 

 the more complete his knowledge is of the scientific truths 

 which are its sole basis. Now these truths, at the present 

 day, are in a condition of more rapid advance and enlarge- 

 ment than they have ever known hitherto. 



At the outset, the practice of physicians was confounded 

 with that of the priesthood. Temples were also hospitals ; 

 but we know nothing certain as to the methods used in 

 them to relieve or heal the sick, any more than as to the 

 circumstances under which the discovery of the earliest 

 remedies was made. The only certain point is that the 

 latter were plants. Hippocrates used hellebore, bastard- 

 saffron seeds, poison-carrot root, as purgatives. He pre- 

 scribed oxymel and hydromel, and practised friction and 

 bleeding. In reality, he used few drugs ; his modes of 

 cure were borrowed from dietetics and hygiene, of which 

 he established the wholesome rules. The immortal prac- 

 titioner of Cos believed that diseases tend toward a cure 

 of their own accord. He admitted that there is such a 

 thing as healing Nature, the effort of which the physician 

 should aid by a suitable regimen. Asclepiades, of Bithy- 

 nia, a scholar of Hippocrates, seems to be the first who 

 understood the narcotic virtues of the poppy. In brief, 

 the doctors of the schools of Cos and Cnidos had very few 

 remedies at their disposal ; but the tolerably rapid advance 

 of natural history soon disclosed medicinal qualities in many 

 substances derived from the organic kingdoms. Those works 

 in which Aristotle and Theophrastus have summed up the 



