6 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF SCIENCE IN MEDICINE. 



the degree to which one period can influence that which 

 comes after it. In spite of all that has been lost, our 

 debt to classical antiquity is one that never can be 

 measured, and with the art of printing and the distribu- 

 tion of books over the world it would seem impossible 

 that any important element in our own culture should be 

 lost to our successors when our civilisation perishes in 

 its turn. 



These considerations are of no little significance in 

 relation to the development of medical science. We are 

 aware of three great periods of civilisation in Europe 

 during the past 5000 years — the Mediterranean or Minoan, 

 with its headquarters in Crete, from 3000 to 1200 B.C.; 

 the Classical, of which Greece was the fountain head; 

 and the Modern or Western, in which we are still living. 

 We know too little of the first of these, at least from the 

 aspect of science, to enable me to say much about it ; 

 medical science, so far as we are aware, began with the 

 ancient Greeks. 



This statement requires justification, for we know that 

 the older civilisations of Egypt and Babylonia had some 

 acquaintance with medicine and attained a certain degree 

 of surgical and therapeutic skill. I have spoken of 

 Science as an endeavour to formulate the laws of Nature, 

 and as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Now 

 the Egyptians, as Prof. Burnet has pointed out, had 

 invented certain practical rules of mensuration, amongst 

 others one which involved the properties of the triangle 

 with sides of 3, 4 and 5 units respectively, but they used 

 their rules empirically. The Greeks took this knowledge 

 and began to study the properties of numbers for their 

 own sake : Pythagoras proved the abstract proposition 

 which we know as Euclid I, 47. The Greeks originated 

 the science of mathematics. Similarly the Babylonians 

 amassed data concerning the heavenly bodies, and arrived 

 at a certain periodicity of eclipses, but they made no 

 attempt, so far as we know, to formulate the laws 

 governing the movements of the sun, moon and stars. 



