[381] Xenophon’s expression (ιατροὺς κατέστησαν ὀκτω) has been supposed by some commentators to indicate that eight soldiers, perhaps previously experienced to some extent in tending the wounded, were selected and improvised into medical officers, rather than that eight were chosen out of a greater number of medical attendants present with the army. But, in all probability, there were present among the ten thousand Greeks more than eight men who professed the imperfect medical knowledge pertaining to the surgeons of that day. In a later part of the _Anabasis_ (v. 8), Xenophon, in defending himself against accusations of alleged severity on his part, in the course of the retreat, to some of the soldiers under his command, argues for its necessity on the principle that “physicians also use incisions and caustics for the good of their patients.” He owns to having urged some, when themselves unwilling, to continue their march towards the shores of the Black Sea, through the cold and snows of Armenia, “because,” says he, “sitting down and rest made the blood to congeal, and the toes to rot off, which was the case of a great many,”—a result that lately happened only too frequently to the soldiers of our own armies on the opposite or Crimean shores of the Euxine. [382] _De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni_, lib. ix. cap. 18. In lib. iv. cap. 25, an account is given of the extraction of an arrow from the king’s shoulder, by the surgeon Philip of Acarnania, who had previously cured Alexander of the attack of fever which followed on his bathing, when overheated, in the cold waters of the Cydnus. Curtius speaks (iii. 13) of Philip as one “inter nobiles medicos,” who were present with the army. When describing the well-known incident of the fever draught given by this physician Philip to Alexander, Arrian speaks of him, not as a medical attendant upon the king, but as one “in whose extraordinary skill in physic Alexander had great confidence, because of his success in the camp,” or in attending upon other members of the army.—(Lib. ii. cap. 4.) Alexander himself affected some knowledge of medicine. At least, when Craterus was invalided, and Pausanias, the physician in attendance upon him, proposed to give him a dose of hellebore, Alexander (as we are informed by Plutarch) wrote a letter to Pausanias, expressing his great anxiety about the case, and desiring him to be cautious in the use of this medicine. In Alexander’s own chest-wound, as detailed in the text above, the head of the arrow possibly did not enter the cavity of the thorax, as its point was, according to Plutarch’s account, fixed in the bone (the scapula or a rib?). When Julius Cæsar fell under the daggers of his assassins, out of the twenty-three wounds which he received, there was none that was mortal, in the opinion of the surgeon Antistisius, except the second, a penetrating wound of the breast.