426 HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGY. 



great figure in the history of medicine, Asclepiades 

 of Prusa in Bithynia. This man appears to have 

 been a quack, with the usual endowments of his 

 class ; boldness, singularity, a contemptuous rejec- 

 tion of all previously esteemed opinions, a new 

 classification of disease's, a new list of medicines, 

 and the assertion of some wonderful cures. He 

 would not, on such accounts, deserve a place in the 

 history of science, but that he became the founder 

 of a new school, the Methodic, which professed to 

 hold itself separate both from the Dogmatics and 

 the Empirics. 



I have noticed these schools of medicine, be- 

 cause, though I am not able to state distinctly their 

 respective merits in the cultivation of anatomy, a 

 great progress in that science was undoubtedly made 

 during their domination, of which the praise must, 

 I conceive, be in some way divided among them. 

 The amount of this progress we are able to esti^ 

 mate, when we come to the works of Galen, who 

 flourished under the Antonines, and died about 

 A.D. 203. The following passage from his works 

 will show that this progress in knowledge was not 

 made without the usual condition of laborious and 

 careful experiment, while it implies the curious fact 

 of such experiment being conducted by means of 

 family tradition and instruction, so as to give rise to 

 a caste of dissectors. In the opening of his Second 

 Book, On Anatomical Manipulations, he speaks 

 thus of his predecessors : " I do not blame the 



