EDITORIAL. 
93 
These  three  ages  our  author  divides  into  eight  periods,  which  he  succintly 
indicates  as  follows: 
"  The  first,  which  we  name  the  Primitive  Period  or  thai  of  Instinct,  ends 
with  the  ruin  of  Troy,  about  twelve  centuries  before  the  Christian  Era. 
"The  second,  called  the  Mystic  or  Sacred  Period,  extends  from  the  disso 
lution  of  the  Pythagorean  society  to  about  the  year  500  A.  C. 
"The  third  period,  which  ends  at  the  foundation  of  the  Alexandrian  li- 
brary. A.  C.  320,  we  name  the  Philosophical  Period. 
"The  fourth,  which  we  designate  the  Anatomic,  extends  to  the  end  of  the 
first  age,  i.  e.  to  the  year  200  of  the  Christian  Era. 
"The  fifth  is  called  the  Greek  Period;  it  ends  at  the  destruction  of  the 
Alexandrian  Library,  A.  D.  640. 
"The  sixth  receives  the  surname  of  Arabic  and  closes  with  the  fourteenth 
century. 
''The  seventh  period,  which  begins  the  third  age,  comprises  the  15th 
and  16th  centuries  ;  it  is  distinguished  as  the  Erudite. 
"Finally,  the  eighth  or  last  period  embraces  the  17th  and  18th  centuries. 
T  call  it  the  Reform  Period. 
The  author  has  continued  the  history  of  medicine  to  the  present  time,  in 
a  series  of  detached  essays  published  after  his  work,  which  the  translator 
has  conveniently  brought  together  as  an  addenda.  In  glancing  over  this 
interesting  volume  there  are  many  items  we  should  like  to  offer  for  the  in- 
struction and  amusement  of  our  readers,  and  among  them  the  excellent  bi- 
ographical pictures  which  our  author  sketches  of  medical  characters,  an- 
cient and  modern,  as  Hippocrates,  Galen,  Avicenna,  Ambrose  Pare,  Haller, 
Harvey  and  Jenner,  but  space  will  not  permit.  But  we  must  briefly  allude 
to  two  points  in  the  annals  of  Medicine  which  have  given  an  impulse  to  its 
progress.  The  first  was  when  the  revelation,  by  the  disciples  of  Pythago- 
ras, of  the  mysteries  of  the  Indo-Egyptian  school  of  medicine,  which  for 
ages  had  been  confined  to  the  temples,  caused  the  priests  of  Esculapius  to 
bring  to  light  the  principles  and  rules  of  their  medical  practice  under  the 
penalty  of  seeing  the  sceptre  of  Medicine  fall  from  their  hands.  The  other 
was  the  taking  of  Constantinople  by  the  Turks  in  1483,  under  Mahomet  II, 
which  event  drove  a  large  number  of  learned  men  with  their  manuscripts 
to  the  cities  of  Western  Europe,  where  they  soon  created  a  taste  for  Greek 
literature  and  gave  an  impulse  to  medicine  which  has  never  yet  ceased. 
The  translator,  Dr.  Comegys  has  ably  acquitted  himself  of  the  laborious 
task,  and  merits  the  thanks  of  every  English  medical  reader  in  thus  open- 
ing to  their  perusal  the  best  history  of  medicine  extant,  and  we  doubt  not 
the  work  will  find  a  place  in  the  library  of  every  physician  who  aims  at 
an  acquaintance  with  the  past  history  of  his  profession.  To  the  enlightened 
pharmaceutist  it  also  presents  itself  as  a  means  of  tracing  back  the  his- 
tory of  his  art  in  those  long  periods  when  it  was  involved  in  the  duties  of 
the  physician.  Our  author  says,  "  If  it  be  true,  and  it  cannot  be  doubted, 
that  Therapeutics  is  really  the  essential  part  of  Medicine — if  it,  in  fact, 
combines  all  the  advantages  of  the  science,  it  cannot  be  questioned  but 
that  the  ancients  are  far  in  our  rear;"  and  granting  the  author's  premises  it 
may  not  be  saying  too  much  to  aver,  that  the  progress  of  Therapeutics  in 
the  last  two  centuries  has  been  largely  aided  by  the  severance  of  Pharmacy 
