THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF SCIENCE IN MEDICINE. I 3 



elsewhere, and especially to Alexandria, but it remains 

 Greek. Alexandrian culture represents a sort of con- 

 tinuation of that of Athens, though, perhaps, in com- 

 parison, smacking somewhat of Wardour Street. The great 

 creative age in art and poetry had gone by ; it was a 

 period of imitation in art, and in literature largely a time 

 of scholiasts and commentators on the better work that 

 had been done before. But here we have an excellent 

 illustration of Flinders Petrie's dictum that, in each 

 period of culture, science reaches its prime long after art 

 and literature have begun to decline. For all the 

 branches of science, then extant, continued to advance 

 in Alexandria. I need hardly recall how mathematics 

 and astronomy flourished under the Ptolemies, while in 

 medical science the Alexandrian school maintained its 

 premiership for many hundred years. Anatomy and 

 physiology form a necessary basis for medical science, 

 and, much as the earlier Greeks had done for medicine, 

 they had lacked any adequate knowledge of these subjects. 

 The later Greeks proceeded to remedy this defect. The 

 practice of dissection became established, and anatomists 

 must look back to the Alexandrian school for the founda- 

 tion of their science. I must pass over Herophilus and 

 Erasistratus, and commemorate the later Greek school 

 in the person of its most distinguished alumnus — Galen. 



The gifts of Rome to Europe were law, order and 

 settled government : the Romans left us a stately litera- 

 ture, but to science, as to art, they made little original 

 contribution. If we except the elder Pliny's ' Naturalis 

 Historia,' itself largely a compendium, Rome produced 

 no great scientific work. Roman medicine, like its art, 

 was wholly Greek in origin : its great physicians received 

 their training in Greek schools, and Celsus, the best- 

 known writer on medical subjects, was not himself a 

 practitioner of medicine. Thus, though we associate 

 Galen with Rome, I must commemorate him as a Greek 

 — the last and in many ways the greatest of the Greek 

 physicians, 



