276 THB EARLY HISTORY OF VETERINARY MEDICINE. 
exercise and moderate regimen. When the disease evidently pro¬ 
ceeds from fatigue, and is accompanied by loss of flesh, he re¬ 
commends a tonic and nutritive diet. The mode of treatment 
advised by him in other affections is equally worthy of praise, on 
account of its simplicity. The only thing for which he can be 
reproached is his having recourse to amulets and superstitious 
practices, as preservatives from disease ; that which did so much 
injury to veterinary medicine in the latter period of the Roman 
empire, and to so great a degree arrested its progress. 
The nervous or contagious putrid fever of horses was then 
generally dreaded. We have no fragment of Apsyrtus on this 
subject; but passages from Pisterius of Sicily, Leontius, ^milius 
of Spain, and Litorius of Benevento, lead us to suppose that 
they had already witnessed some appearances of this dread¬ 
ful malady under an epizootic form. The ancient veterinarians 
endeavoured to prevent the progress of the malady by separating 
the sound horses from the diseased, and which they could only 
accomplish by means of convenient stabling and pasturage*. 
We do not find, in ancient authors, whether before or after the 
establishment of Christianity, any plan for measures of this kind 
in contagious diseases of the human being; unless, indeed, we 
reckon the various regulations of the police for the purification of 
the air, established both among the Greeks and the Romans. 
Ccelius Aurelianus even blames the salutary counsel given by 
some physicians of his time to prevent the contagion of leprosy, 
by cutting off all connexion with those that are infected, and 
says that medicine is incapable of such an act of inhumanity. 
They knew, even then, the manner in which contagious diseases 
are propagatedf; but the prejudice, the barbarism, the superstition, 
♦ In the “ Geoponicorurn, sive de re rustica,’’ drawn up by order of Con¬ 
stantine Porpliyrogenitus, there are many important fragments on veterinary 
medicine, which are not found in the collection entitled Hippiatrica, 
and which may serve to render this last work more complete. The passage 
where the isolation of horses labouring under certain complaints is men¬ 
tioned, is not found in the Greek edition of the Hippiatrica, but is con¬ 
tained in the Latin translation of (Feterinariis Medicma),yv\\iQ\i 
is in many respects more complete. 
f See Marx, Origines contagii. 
