Chap. 2.] 
REMEDIES DERIYED PEOM MATf, 
277 
possibly be accounted the pursuit of health for man to make 
himself a wild beast, and so deserve to contract disease from 
the very remedies he adopts for avoiding it. Most righteously, 
by Hercules ! if such attempts are all in vain, is he disap- 
pointed of his cure ! To examine human entrails is deemed 
an act of impiety f what then must it be to devour them ? 
Say, Osthanes,"^ who was it that first devised these practices : 
for it is thee that I accuse, thou uprooter of all human laws, 
thou inventor of these monstrosities ; devised, no doubt, with 
the view that mankind might not forget thy name ! Who was 
it that first thought of devouring each member of the human 
body ? By what conjectural motives was he induced ? What 
can possibly have been the origin of such a system of medicine as 
this ? Who was it that thus made the very poisons less baneful 
than the antidotes prescribed for them ? Granted that barbarous 
and outlandish tribes first devised such practices, must the 
men of Greece, too, adopt these as arts of their own ? 
We read, for instance, in the memoirs of Democritus, still 
extant, that for some diseases, the skull of a malefactor is most 
efficacious, while for the treatment of others, that of one who 
has been a friend or guest is required. Apollonius, again, in- 
forms us in his writings, that the most effectual remedy for 
tooth-ache is to scarify the gums with the tooth of a man who 
has died a violent death ; and, according to Miletus, human gall 
is a cure for cataract.^ For epilepsy, Artemon has prescribed 
water drawn from a spring in the night, and drunk from the 
skull of a man who has been slain, and whose body remains 
unburnt. From the skull, too, of a man who had been hanged, 
Antaeus made pills that were to be an antidote to the bite of a 
mad dog. Even more than this, man has resorted to similar re- 
medies for the cure of four-footed beasts even — for tympanitis in 
oxen, for instance, the horns have been perforated, and human 
bones inserted ; and when swine have been found to be diseased, 
® Hence, as Ajasson remarks, the ignorance of anatomy displayed by the 
ancients. 
For further particulars as to Osthanes, see B. xxix. c. 80, and B. xxx. 
cc. 5 and 6 ; also cc. 19 and 77 of the present Book. The reading, how- 
ever, is very doubtful, 
^ " Oculorum suffusiones." As Ajasson says, the remedy here mentioned 
reminds us of the more harmless one used by Tobias for the cure of the 
blindness of his father Tobit. 
