158 
PLTFT's NATUllAL HISTORY. 
[Book XXYL 
was very considerably enhanced by the following incident : 
meeting the funeral procession of a person unknown to him, 
he ordered the body to be removed from the funeral pile^'* and 
carried home, and was thus the means of saving his life. This 
circumstance I am the more desirous to mention, that it may 
not be imagined that it was on slight grounds only that so 
extensive a revolution was effected in the medical art. 
There is, however, one thing, and one thing only, at which 
we have any ground for indignation, — the fact, that a single 
individual, and he belonging to the most frivolous nation^^ in 
the world, a man born in utter indigence, should ail on a 
sudden, and that, too, for the sole purpose of increasing his 
income, give a new code of medical laws to mankind ; laws, 
however, be it remembered, which have been annulled by 
numerous authorities since his day. The success of Asclepi- 
ades was considerabl}^ promoted by many of the usages of ancient 
medicine, repulsive in their nature, and attended with far too 
much anxiety : thus, for instance, it was the practice to cover 
up the patient with vast numbers of clothes, and to adopt 
every possible method of promoting the perspiration ; to order 
the body to be roasted before a fire ; or else to be continually 
sending the patient on a search for sunshine, a thing hardly to 
be found in a showery climate like that of this city of ours ; 
or rather, so to say, of the whole of Italy, so prolific^^* as it is 
of fogs and rain.''^*^ It was to remedy these inconveniences, 
that he introduced the use of hanging baths,^' an invention 
that was found grateful to invalids in the very highest 
degree. 
In addition to this, he modified the tortures which had 
hitherto attended the treatment of certain maladies; as in 
quinzy for instance, the cure of which before his time had been 
usually effected by the introduction of an instruments^ into the 
throat. He condemned, and with good reason, the indiscrimi- 
nate use of emetics, which till then had been resorted to in a 
2* See B. vii. c. 37. Apuleius gives the story at considerable length, in 
the Florida, B. iv. 
23 Asia Minor. Asclepiades was a native of Prusa in Bithynia. 
25* adopt Sillig's suggestion, and read " nimborura. altrice," the 
word " imperatrice " being evidently out of place. The climate of Italy 
seems to have changed very materially since his day. 
26 See B. ii. c. 51. 27 gee B. ix. c. 79. ^ Organo." 
