278 FISH IN MYTHS, SYMBOLS, DIET, MEDICINE 



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

 effort. That attached to the only illustration 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 multiplied even one thousandfold, there would yet 

 remain in the pages of medical 1 and other writers (even if we 

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



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 : 



//era (jelo, fxuKaip Yytcta, 



TeOaXe. Trdvra kol Xafxirei XaptVwv eapi 



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 



1 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 N. H., XXIX. i, 7. Not 

 iiiap]:)ropriate, and probably not infrequent, when we read of their number 

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

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

 probably a Latin adaptation of Menander's iroWwv larpwv tUtroSos /j.' airw\e(7(v. 



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

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

 omniscient Athena^us 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. 



