TRANSLATIONS FROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
229 
Ideas had to be modified before the world could under¬ 
stand the doctrines of Christ and their beneficial consequences. 
In the East man had lost even the instinct of the study of 
nature; necessity had preserved the tradition of the medical 
art, which made no progress; on the contrary, it retro¬ 
graded. Galenism degenerated. It was no longer trans¬ 
mitted in its purity—the key of the language in which Galen 
wrote was lost. The translations, the commentaries, the 
Arabianism, altered and disfigured his works, which thereby 
lost the stamp of genius which Galen had impressed on 
them. The neoplatonitians and the astrologers caused me¬ 
dical science to make an enormous retrograde movement; 
cabals and the subtleties of the scolastics transformed Galen¬ 
ism so throughly that it became a mere manual art—a gross 
and brutalising empiricism. 
If the life of man, the lord of the creation, was thus 
jeopardised by ignorance and superstition, what could be ex¬ 
pected of veterinary medicine, which had been left in its 
infancy, and to which its elder sister, human medicine, had 
held out no helping hand when better able? The collection 
of Greek Hippiatres, the Geoponics, which the Emperor 
Constantine has caused to be handed down to posterity, only 
contain a few rare symptoms which are not very intelligible, 
and the majority of the remedies to be applied to these 
symptoms, are not anterior to the third century. Some 
fragments of these collections show that the medical men of 
the day were as ignorant of medicine as applied to animals, 
as the Hippiatres were of that of man. On some points the 
latter were more advanced than the former. They had re¬ 
cognised the contagious nature of diseases, and prescribed 
measures to prevent it. The epidemics and epizootics were 
designated by the Greeks under the common name of Aoqtdc*. 
In the pestilential fever or Aoqxou of the horse, Apsyrtus 
recommends the separation of the sick animals from the 
healthy, and the isolation of the former in convenient pas¬ 
tures. If we abstract certain measures which were taken for 
the purification of the air, we find no trace in antiquity of 
any recommendation as to the sequestration or isolation of 
any individual affected with contagious disease. Caelius Aure- 
rnalus even rejects the advice of his contemporaries to 
sequester the leprous, for the simple reason that medicine 
could not act contrary to humanity (quod a de alienum huma- 
nitas approhat vaediciua). Flocks and herds have thus enjoyed 
a protection against contagion before the human race. The 
Greek hippiatrists were acquainted with the section of the 
muscles. Pelagonius describes those of the tail thus : Summum 
