TRANSLATIONS FROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 227 
soon followed by a retrograde movement. It was only 
during the third period that its aspirations to the title of 
Science were manifested. 
In all countries and in all ages epizootics have been con¬ 
sidered as public calamities. One fact leads us to suppose that 
the priest came to the assistance of the flocks. The tomb 
of Podalyre, son of Esculapius, was the object of veneration to 
■which the herdsmen went in pilgrimage when disease ravaged 
their flocks. The priest did not neglect to collect observations* 
of which philosophy profited when medicine left the temples 
and formed an intimate alliance with philosophy. Pythagoras 
and his school effected this revolution, from which time medi¬ 
cine, like philosophy, became of scientific culture. Passing 
the philosophy of Pythagoras and the Asclepiadian school, 
of which Hippocrates was the illustrious representer, it was 
thought that the liquids were more susceptible of alteration 
than the solids, and pathologists were disposed to seek the 
cause of disease in these alterations. This school replaced 
the four elements of the Pythagoreans by the four cardinal 
humours—the blood, the mucus,the bile,and the atrabile—the 
mixture of which formed the living body. The predominance 
or disproportion of one caused malady. A cure resulted from 
the re-establishing of their proportions. Thus the most ancient 
system of medicine was not only material but humoral,and dif¬ 
fered only from the Pathagorean by the form,disease derived its 
origin from the materia peccans, cruclem et intemperatum , which 
the sick body was to elaborate. Hippocrates distinguished 
three periods in the malady, as the crude, the coction, and 
the crisis. The innate caloric produced the coction, and this 
brought about the crisis, which was ordained bv Divine 
* The works of Homer give an idea of medical science at the beginning 
of Grecian civilization, during the sacerdotal epoch. The effect of the wounds 
received by the Greek and Trojan heroes are described with a correctness 
which leaves nothing to desire even in our time. The mortal and curable 
wounds are described according to the several regions. Achilles struck 
Hector on the inferior part of the throat, the cut did not divide the windpipe, 
and Hector was enabled to answer a few words. Homer knew then that the 
trachea was the conductor of the voice, and that if it had been interrupted 
the voice would have been lost. Antilochus cuts through the vein of the 
neck of a Trojan, who dies immediately. Achilles, with a blow of the sword, 
separates the head of Deucalion, and the marrow shoots out of the vertebra. 
A thrust of a lance penetrated between the head and the neck, the wounded 
man fell down dead with his face on the ground. Paris shot an arrow at 
Nestor, it glided off and struck one of the horses at, the point where the 
mane is attached to the head; all wounds at this region, says the poet, are 
mortal. But in these cases the phenomena are not the same; in the first 
case the weapon touches the spinal chord and death is instantaneous; in the 
second the arrow enters the cranium, and the animal gives a leap from the 
pain and rolls on the ground. 
