505 
A SHORT SKETCH, ETC. 
—“ Experience and Comprehension.” But the experience of 
individuals often varies to an extreme degree, and the understand¬ 
ing (comprehension) of medical objects is not to be confined 
within too narrow limits, and always requires renewed criticism— 
the cognitio certa ex principiis certis. 
One of the seven Thales of Milet, (629 -544 B.C.) by means 
of his natural philosophical taste, inspired in his students an active 
desire to make observations upon the vital phenomena of the 
animal organism, and to consider anatomical relations which led 
to the development of a theoretic medicine. 
Pythagoras, of Samos, (580-504 B.C.) greatly enriched his 
knowledge by journeys to Egypt and to cultivated (in the educa¬ 
tional sense) parts of Asia, and on his return to Krotona estab¬ 
lished the first medical school, where he especially gave utterance 
to the conviction, that medicine and the public hygiene were things 
which did belong to the priests. His student Alkmaeon, also Em¬ 
pedocles, (born 504 B.C.) and as Aristotle expressly mentions, 
Diogenes of Appolonia, busied themselves with anatomical re¬ 
searches upon animals with the desire of furthering themselves in 
their work as doctors; and Hippocrates (460 B.C.) is declared by 
Democrites to have been the wisest of all natural philosophers, as 
he found him busied with anatomical researches. Hippocrates is, 
however, to be declared the hero of medicine, in that he betook 
himself to the consultation of the Tables of Devotion, which 
those healed in the Asclepien temples had offered to the gods in 
thankfulness for the cure. Upon these tables were designated 
the nature of the diseases and the means by which they were 
cured ; from these Hippocrates drew conclusions of the value of 
the different means of healing, and set the wheel of medical pro¬ 
gress rolling in a victorious direction, and uttered his most 
important saying, “ that the human body was not to be understood 
without a knowledge of the entire world” We observe that he 
must have dissected diseased animals, as he speaks of hydrops and 
hydatids in the lungs. He combatted the ruling idea with regard 
to the nature of epilepsia, i.e. —that demons were the cause of 
the same—as by opening the cranium of goats affected by the 
disease in question, he found water to be present. 
