MEDICAL SCIENCES. 



'39 



licivsy of Nestorius. The professors u hose orthodoxy was not in conformity 

 with that of the Greek Church were deprived of their salaries by a decree of 

 Justinian, who at the same time wrought the final ruin of the Athens school. 



The chairs of philosophy and medicine were not, however, altogether 

 untenanted in the East, for the Arab schools were still in existence, though 

 their teaching did not go beyond a few books of Pliny the Elder, of Dioscorides, 

 of Aristotle, and of Galen, very imperfectly translated from Greek or Latin 





Fig. 8. Physician, from the " Danse Macabre," Guyot Marchant edition, 1490. 



into Syriac, and then retranslated into Arabic with a multiplicity of errors 

 (Fig. 97). The school of Alexandria had ceased to be more than a shadow of 

 her former self, the lessons of the masters of science were forgotten, and all 

 that she possessed was a few rhetoricians, who, instead of confining themselves 

 to a careful observation of causes and effects, commentated apocryphal and 

 ridiculous books, and applied themselves to the discovery of useless or insen- 

 sate solutions. Thus, for instance, they discussed why the hand has five 



