MEDICAMENTS AND LIFE. 205 
ception, practised skill, and watchful diligence, from the 
inexhaustible resources of science. It is his to seize upon 
slight hints, and, with intuitive judgment, to refer the con- 
fused and irregular group of symptoms to the well-ascer- 
tained mechanism which only can explain them. He will 
perform this task the more easily and the more successfully, 
the more complete his knowledge is of the scientific truths 
which are its sole basis. Now these truths, at the present 
day, are in a condition of more rapid advance and enlarge- 
ment than they have ever known hitherto. 
I. 
At the outset, the practice of physicians was confounded 
with that of the priesthood. Temples were also hospitals ; 
but we know nothing certain as to the methods used in 
them to relieve or heal the sick, any more than as to the 
circumstances under which the discovery of the earliest 
remedies was made. The only certain point is that the 
latter were plants. Hippocrates used hellebore, bastard- 
saffron seeds, poison-carrot root, as purgatives. He pre- 
scribed oxymel and hydromel, and practised friction and 
bleeding. In reality, he used few drugs; his modes of 
cure were borrowed from dietetics and hygiene, of which 
he established the wholesome rules. The immortal prac- 
titioner of Cos believed that diseases tend toward a cure 
of their own accord. He admitted that there is such a 
thing as healing Nature, the effort of which the physician 
should aid by a suitable regimen. Asclepiades, of Bithy- 
nia, a scholar of Hippocrates, seems to be the first who 
understood the narcotic virtues of the poppy. In brief, 
the doctors of the schools of Cos and Cnidos had very few 
remedies at their disposal; but the tolerably rapid advance 
of natural history soon disclosed medicinal qualities in many 
substances derived from the organic kingdoms. Those works 
in which Aristotle and Theophrastus have summed up the 
