10 fiit BIRTH AND GROWTH OF SCIENCE IN MEDICINE. 



those times seems to have been bound up with fetish- 

 worship and superstition. There is no evidence that 

 Egypt had any true medical science to impart, and our 

 knowledge of Minoan medicine is hmited to the single 

 fact that in the great palace at Cnossus there existed a 

 system of sanitation so good that it was never equalled 

 till the reign of Queen Victoria. We may be quite sure 

 that the inquisitive and receptive Greek mind was quick 

 to pick up what it could from the older civilisations, and 

 then, in accordance with its peculiar genius, it proceeded 

 to develop it out of all recognition. The greatest achieve- 

 ments of the Greeks were not in medical science : other 

 sciences had to develop before medicine could rest upon 

 a proper foundation ; but what they did for medicine was 

 no small thing. 



Their physicians were usually philosophers, and their 

 philosophers speculated as freely about the functions of 

 the body as they did about the universe. Their physiology 

 naturally reflected their views on science in general. The 

 school of Empedocles identified his four elements with 

 the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry, and loss of 

 balance between these opposites was held to produce 

 disease. Had such crude speculations been all, medicine 

 might have owed little to the earlier Greeks. But there 

 was much more. The Greeks were acute observers, and 

 they began to study and to record the phenomena of 

 disease, grouping and classifying according to the lights 

 of the time : thus medicine entered upon its first scientific 

 stage ; it became an observational science. More than 

 this, just as in other matters the philosophers had put 

 away the myths and fairly tales of their ancestors, so, too, 

 in medicine they rejected the magic and fetish-worship 

 which had hitherto formed so large a part of practice : 

 this was one of the greatest services rendered by the 

 Greeks to medical science. Not that medicine became 

 altogether dissociated from religion. /Esculapius was 

 worshipped at num.erous temples, and thither the sick 

 were brought to receive such benefit as they might from 



