BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1237 



the beginnings of these far-penetrating inquiries in old Hippocrates' 

 keen scrutiny of "Temperaments" and their significance, in health 

 and in disease ? The students of heredity have long been discussing 

 this question, and so are eugenists too. 



MEDICINE AS APPLIED BIOLOGY 



So much and justly is heard of the strides of medicine in modern 

 times that we are a httle apt to forget the extent to which the 

 apparently new is a recovery of lost knowledge. Hippocrates has 

 never ceased to be its historic master; and even Galen — who of all 

 authorities was longest maintained by obscurantism, even against 

 Harvey's discovery of the circulation — is now vindicated by his 

 latest translator and commentator as the very Bergson of his age. 

 A good many years ago the British Museum's decipherer of a 

 Babylonian library faithfully translated one of its medical works, 

 in which he found that "the wasting sickness is communicated by 

 the sputum of the patient". But this had to wait for understanding, 

 until later studies of tuberculosis, and Koch's discovery of its 

 bacillus. How many scores of millions of patients have suffered and 

 died throughout the many centuries between the losing of such clear 

 knowledge and the recovery of it ? 



Again take a Biblical saying, "the pestilence walketh in darkness". 

 Though doubtless scholarly commentators dissipate this into 

 symbolism, the Jews have from a long past produced physicians 

 second to none; and it, at any rate, seems a strange anticipation 

 of what we are still learning in our own day as to the many 

 bactericidal and other curative values of sunlight. More obviously 

 certain is that while other oriental countries like India to this day 

 keep no cats or but rarely, and thus keep rats and mice (lovers of 

 darkness) in abundance, with consequent visitations of plague from 

 their fleas, the wise Egyptians not only cherished the cat but 

 elevated her to the rank of a goddess, Bubastis, who thus protected 

 them in her turn; while as further confirmation of this, we are told 

 by the Egyptologist that the hieroglyphic symbol for plague is an 

 unmistakably well-sketched rat. So, too, for the keeping of pigeons 

 in India there is obvious bio-medical justification, since they pick 

 up crumbs before the rats come out at night ; though Columba is 

 less efficient than Bubastis, since she is nocturnal too. 



Modern physicians are thus being reminded of values in past 

 traditions of their art; so among the many rising organisations 

 of medical research, is there not still room for a careful inquiry 

 into these? Thus in India the Hindus and the Moslems have 

 each their distinctively trained physicians, the vaids and the 

 hakims respectively, representing distinct schools of medicine, the 



