XIV BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE 351 



The history of medicine is more complete and 

 fuller than that of any other science, except, per- 

 haps, astronomy ; and, if we follow back the long 

 record as far as clear evidence lights us, we find 

 ourselves taken to the early stages of the civilisa- 

 tion of Greece. The oldest hospitals were the 

 temples of ^Esculapius; to these Asclepeia, 

 always erected on healthy sites, hard by fresh 

 springs and surrounded by shady groves, the sick 

 and the maimed resorted to seek the aid of the 

 god of health. Votive tablets or inscriptions 

 recorded the symptoms, no less than the gratitude, 

 of those who were healed ; and, from these primi- 

 tive clinical records, the half-priestly, half-philo- 

 sophic caste of the Asclepiads compiled the data 

 upon which the earliest generalisations of 

 medicine, as an inductive science, were based. 



In this state, pathology, like all the inductive 

 sciences at their origin, was merely natural 

 history ; it registered the phenomena of disease, 

 classified them, and ventured upon a prognosis, 

 wherever the observation of constant co-existences 

 and sequences suggested a rational expectation 

 of the like recurrence under similar circum- 

 stances. 



Further than this it hardly went. In fact, in 

 the then state of knowledge, and in the condition 

 of philosophical speculation at that time, neither 

 the causes of the morbid state, nor the rationale 

 of treatment, were likely to be sought for as we 



