SCIENCE OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 



selves. The practising physicians in early Rome were 

 mostly men of Greek origin, who came to the capital 

 after the overthrow of the Greeks by the Romans. 

 Many of them were slaves, as earning money by either 

 bodily or mental labor was considered beneath the 

 dignity of a Roman citizen. The wealthy Romans, 

 who owned large estates and numerous slaves, were in 

 the habit of purchasing some of these slave doctors, 

 and thus saving medical fees by having them attend to 

 the health of their families. 



By the beginning of the Christian era medicine as a 

 profession had sadly degenerated, and in place of a 

 class of physicians who practised medicine along ra- 

 tional or legitimate lines, in the footsteps of the great 

 Hippocrates, there appeared, great numbers of "spe- 

 cialists," most of them charlatans, who pretended to 

 possess supernatural insight in the methods of treat- 

 ing certain forms of disease. These physicians rightly 

 earned the contempt of the better class of Romans, and 

 were made the object of many attacks by the satirists 

 of the time. Such specialists travelled about from 

 place to place in much the same manner as the itiner- 

 ant " Indian doctors " and " lightning tooth-extractors " 

 do to-day. Eye-doctors seem to have been particu- 

 larly numerous, and these were divided into two classes, 

 eye-surgeons and eye-doctors proper. The eye-sur- 

 geon performed such operations as cauterizing for in- 

 growing eyelashes and operating upon growths about 

 the eyes ; while the eye-doctors depended entirely upon 

 salves and lotions. These eye-salves were frequently 

 stamped with the seal of the physician who compound- 

 ed them, something like two hundred of these seals 



VOL. i. 1 8 273 



