ANCIENT SCIENCE. 



medical sciences can claim our attention in these pages. Hippocrates 

 deserves notice as having been the first who attempted to base the 

 practice of his art upon rational and scientific principles. Before his 

 time diseases were ascribed to the direct agency of offended deities, 

 and the chief remedial measures were sacrifice and prayer to the 

 gods. Hipprocrates was born in the little island of Cos, where his 



FIG. 7. HIPPOCRATES OF Cos. 



ancestors had practised medicine jbr generations, as priests of the 

 temple of ^Esculapius. But Hippocrates threw aside all traditional 

 mystery, and sought from philosophy and from accurate observation 

 reasonable grounds for his practice. He declared openly the mea- 

 sures he adopted in the treatment of diseases, frankly acknowledging 

 his failures, and he willingly taught his art to all who chose to become 

 his pupils. His descriptions of the symptoms and courses of diseases 

 are wonderfully accurate; but the progress of science has for the 

 most part superseded his theories. His doctrines ruled the practice 

 of medicine for ages ; and his ideas of the causes of disease are still 

 so popularly current everywhere, that in the language, and sometimes 

 in the practice, of our surgeons and apothecaries we can trace the 



