278 FISH IN MYTHS, SYMBOLS, DIET, MEDICINE 
One lemma “ Pingit et delectat’’ is not the author’s happiest 
effort. That attached to the only illustration of a man fishing 
—Tenet et tenetur—tersely depicts the happy angler. 
Many instances illustrating the importance attached to 
fish, both in diet and in medicine, are to be found scattered 
through my pages. I would, however, wager that in addition 
to these multiplied even one thousandfold, there would yet 
remain in the pages of medical ! and other writers (even if we 
stop as early as Aétius) matter sufficient for a large Monograph.? 
In one book alone of Pliny’s (XX XII.) fish are recommended 
as remedies, internal or external, no less than (according to 
my rough reckoning) 342 times ! 
If Hippocrates, ‘‘the father of Medicine,” in the fifth 
century B.C. (c. 460-359) laid the foundation, Galen some 
six centuries later (131-201 A.D.) crowned the edifice of that 
science. The cry and the practice of the former, ‘‘ Back to 
Nature,” was energetically enjoined and brilliantly defended 
against the inevitable reactions of the Alexandrian and other 
schools by the latter, who acclaims his predecessor as “ divine.” 
In his insistent teaching ‘‘ Ensue Health,”’ as the one and 
only thing alike for patients and physicians, Galen 3 might 
well have adopted the last line of Ariphron’s glorious pean 
to Health : 
‘ aA : > hg 
pera ceto, paxaip “Yyiea, 
tare mdvra Kai Adpmret Xapirwv gape 
obey 8é xupis odtis cidaipwr edu. 
In his own case success crowned his efforts. He boldly 
boasts that he did not desire to be esteemed a physician, if 
from his twenty-eighth year to old age he had not lived in 
perfect health, except for some slight fevers, of which he soon 
1 To Galen alone 149 works are attributed. 
2 For a list of practitioners, medical authors, and quacks before Pliny, 
and the enormous fees sometimes paid them, see N. H., XXIX. 1, 7. Not 
inappropriate, and probably not infrequent, when we read of their number 
and their disagreements, was the epitaph—Tuyrba se medicorum perisse. This 
attribution of death to too many doctors is accredited to Hadrian, but is 
probably a Latin adaptation of Menander’s roAaGy iatpay efcodos pw’ anddrecer. 
3 It is with some surprise that we read of Galen being one of the original 
Deipnosophiste (I. 2), and with more still that we find the omnivorous and 
omniscient Athenzus quoting but once from this most prolific author, and 
that a passage which lays down, let us trust from the experience of his patients 
that Falernian wine over twenty years old causes headaches. 
