of Health at Cnidos, in order to destroy the evidence of plagiarism, and
that he refused to visit Persia at the request of Artaxerxes Longimanus,
during a pestilential epidemic, on the ground that he would in so doing
be assisting an enemy. He is referred to by Plato (_Protag._ p. 283;
_Phaedr._ p. 211) as an eminent medical authority, and his opinion is
also quoted by Aristotle. The veneration in which he was held by the
Athenians serves to dissipate the calumnies which have been thrown on
his character by Andreas, and the whole tone of his writings bespeaks a
man of the highest integrity and purest morality.
Born of a family of priest-physicians, and inheriting all its traditions
and prejudices, Hippocrates was the first to cast superstition aside,
and to base the practice of medicine on the principles of inductive
philosophy. It is impossible to trace directly the influence exercised
upon him by the great men of his time, but one cannot fail to connect
his emancipation of medicine from superstition with the widespread power
exercised over Greek life and thought by the living work of Socrates,
Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus and Thucydides. It was
a period of great intellectual development, and it only needed a
powerful mind such as his to bring to bear upon medicine the same
influences which were at work in other sciences. It must be remembered
that his training was not altogether bad, although superstition entered
so largely into it. He had a great master in Democritus, the originator
of the doctrine of atoms, and there is every reason to believe that the
various "asclepia" were very carefully conducted hospitals for the sick,
possessing a curious system of case-books, in the form of votive
tablets, left by the patients, on which were recorded the symptoms,
treatment and result of each case. He had these records at his command;
and he had the opportunity of observing the system of training and the
treatment of injuries in the gymnasia. One of his great merits is that
he was the first to dissociate medicine from priest-craft, and to direct
exclusive attention to the natural history of disease. How strongly his
mind revolted against the use of charms, amulets, incantations and such
devices appears from his writings; and he has expressly recorded, as
underlying all his practice, the conviction that, however diseases may
be regarded from the religious point of view, they must all be
scientifically treated as subject to natural laws (_De aere_, 29). Nor
was he anxious to maintain the connexion between philosophy and medicine
which had for long existed in a confused and confusing fashion.[1] His
knowledge of anatomy, physiology and pathology was necessarily
defective, the respect in which the dead body was held by the Greeks
precluding him from practising dissection; thus we find him writing of
the tissues without distinguishing between the various textures of the
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