529 



had taken place ; the horror with which the Egyptians and 

 other nations viewed the desecration of the dead had hitherto 

 deprived medicine of the hght of anatomy. But Ptolemy not 

 only instituted human dissections, but, horrible to relate, 

 ordered dissections of living criminals. TertulHan charges 

 Heropliilus with having been the perpetrator ; Celsus admits 

 the fact, and defends it, on the principle that the tortures of 

 a few guilty persons were allowable for the benefit of the 

 whole innocent race of mankind. Perhaps it Avas on the 

 same principle that Louis II., of France, permitted the sur- 

 geons of Paris to perform the terrible operation of lithotomy on 

 condemned soldiers, in order that the operators might acquire 

 dexterity with the knife.* Such was the character of the 

 medical school of Alexandria, that to have studied there was, 

 in the time of the Emperor Valens, deemed a sufficient war- 

 rant for commencing practice. 



"Considering all these facts, the conclusion might be drawn, 

 that the regular physicians of antiquity were very different 

 persons, ia opportunities and acquirements, from the slave 

 physicians. It is singular that in the language of the Greeks 

 and Romans no verbal distinction was made in the names ex- 

 pressive of the two grades ; and it is probably this defect that 

 occasioned the misconception of modern writers with regard 

 to the supposed degraded state of the whole class of ancient 

 physicians. 



" The class of regularly educated practitioners were men of 

 learning and elegant accomplishments. To their ordinary 

 professional acquu-ements in philosophy, medicine, surgery, 

 materia medica, and pharmacy, they frequently superadded 

 rhetoric, oratory, and poetry. Many poetical disquisitions are 

 extant, of great merit as poems, although occasionally on very 

 undignified subjects. Zeno of Athens wrote a poem on a 

 gout-medicine ; Marceiius composed one on medicine in 



* Mangeti Bibl. Script. Med. 1731. 



