i 3 6 MEDICAL SCIENCES. 



to inflammations, loss of blood, intermittent fevers ; his system of antipathies 

 and sympathies, of indications and counter-indications, appertain not less to 

 physiology than to pathology and therapeutics, and show how superior he 

 was to his contemporaries and predecessors. 



Yet, after his death, the doctrines of Hippocrates again obtained preva- 

 lence, though the materialist tendencies seem to be directly opposed to the 

 spiritualism of the Christian faith. The latter, however, did not disown 

 these theories in medico-philosophic science ; and the early monks, who were 

 physicians of the body as well as of the mind, began to transcribe the aphorisms 

 of Hippocrates, the principal treatises of Galen, and the vast repertory of a 

 Greek physician, Coelius Aurelianus, who had taken up and commentated all 

 the books of the methodists. In these times of trouble and uncertainty, pro- 

 fessional teaching had no other sources of knowledge. The cities of Athens, 

 Rome, and Alexandria still had schools of philosophy which attracted a 

 motley crowd of professors and students, and any one was admitted, whether 

 Greek or Arab, Gaul or Roman, Christian or Jew ; for the only restriction 

 upon complete freedom of instruction was that the laws of the state and the 

 prevailing religion should not be attacked by the teachers or their pupils. 

 To this may be traced in the philosophy of that day, as it was called, a 

 strange amalgamation of Eastern reveries and scriptural traditions, of pagan 

 superstitions and Christian legends. The most intelligent men of that time 

 believed that "famine, death, foul air, and epidemics are caused by evil spirits, 

 who, enveloped in a cloud, flit through the lower regions of the atmosphere, 

 to which they are attracted by the blood and the incense offered up to the 

 false divinities. But for the odour of the sacrifices, these spirits would not 

 exist. It is to them alone that are due the wonderful cures attributed to 

 ^Esculapius" (Fig. 96). 



When these ideas were held by the most talented men of the time, it is 

 not astonishing that the common herd should have sought relief for bodily 

 ills in practices of magic and piety, having recourse to talismans, and placing 

 implicit confidence in certain words, formulae, figures, and cabalistic signs, the 

 effect of which was, as they believed, to exorcise the evil spirits and obtain 

 the assistance of the good spirits. 



As the temples of ^Esculapius, Hygeia, and Serapis were closed and 

 these divinities were altogether neglected by the end of the fourth century 

 Christianity opened its churches and its monasteries to the sick, who received 



