HISTORY OF MEDICINE. 373 



issued forth from their temples, and spread over the country as 

 clinical practitioners. One of these was the celebrated Hippo- 

 crates, who, after having been instructed in all the knowledge 

 of the school of Cos, and probably being also well acquainted with 

 that of Cnidus, became an itinerant and clinical practitioner. 

 At first they practised in a circumforaneous manner, but at 

 length they became settled, and practised in the same manner 

 as the physicians of Europe have done ever since. 



Very few accounts remain of the medicines employed in the 

 temples of Esculapius ; and it will readily occur, that the first 

 correct information must be expected and sought for in the 

 most ancient medical writings now remaining, and which are 

 those commonly ascribed to Hippocrates. These writings, 

 however, at least for the purposes of history, afford a precarious 

 and uncertain information ; for, as we now have them collected 

 together, they are certainly the works of many different persons, 

 as well as of different ages ; insomuch, that it is impossible, 

 with any clearness, to judge what was the true state of the 

 materia medica in the time of Hippocrates. Besides, if we re- 

 flect hi how many instances the nomenclature is entirely un- 

 known, and in how many it is very doubtful and uncertain, we 

 shall be satisfied how idle it is in modern writers to quote the 

 authority of Hippocrates for the virtues of almost any medicine. 

 Indeed laying aside our partiality for that celebrated person, there 

 can be no just ground for supposing, that at the period in which 

 he lived, much discernment in the materia medica could have 

 prevailed; and it is hardly necessary to add, that even although 

 the substances named in those writings were known to us with 

 more certainty than they are, yet the distinction of diseases, 

 and of their circumstances, are so seldom given, that at present 

 we can hardly be guided by them in employing any of the me- 

 dicines they suggest. 



This is the substance of what we have to point out to you 

 as remarkable in the first period of our history. It is obvious 

 with regard to the whole, that the art, whether we consider it in 

 its natural state, or in the form of a particular superstition, 

 must have been chiefly dependent upon experience. But while 

 practitioners were thus dependent on experience, we have no 

 reason to presume that they were strongly attached to it that 





