[706] For a list of practitioners, medical authors, and quacks before Pliny, and the enormous fees sometimes paid them, see _N. H._, XXIX. 1, 7. Not inappropriate, and probably not infrequent, when we read of their number and their disagreements, was the epitaph—_Turba se medicorum perisse_. This attribution of death to too many doctors is accredited to Hadrian, but is probably a Latin adaptation of Menander’s πολλῶν ἰατρῶν εἴσοδος μ’ ἀπώλεσεν. [707] It is with some surprise that we read of Galen being one of the original _Deipnosophistæ_ (I. 2), and with more still that we find the omnivorous and omniscient Athenæus quoting but once from this most prolific author, and that a passage which lays down, let us trust from the experience of his patients, that Falernian wine over twenty years old causes headaches. [708] Empedocles, albeit no doctor, is said to have delivered Selinus in Sicily from malaria by drainage, etc., and so roughly anticipated the triumphs of Ross and Gorgas over the mosquito by some 2400 years. See Diog. Laert. VIII. 70, _s.v._ “Empedocles.” [709] _De Alim. Fac._, 3, 28. Cf. _De Attenuante victus ratione_, vol. vi. ed. Chartier, which confirms and amplifies the above. [710] Athen., _op. cit._, VIII., chs. 51-56, which discuss various fishes from a health point of view. [711] _Quæstiones Medicæ et Problemata Physica._ [712] Blakey, _op. cit._, 73. [713] Cf. Burton, _op. cit._, 1, 97, whose trs. is given above. [714] The belief in fish as curatives of not only human but also animal ailments still lingers. In this very year, 1920, we read in _The Field_, Aug. 14, of a Ross-shire crofter begging for a live trout to push down the throat of a cow, that had just calved but was suffering from hæmorrhage. In consequence, or in spite of the trout, the cow recovered. [715] _De Materia Medica_, II. 33; I. 181, ed. (Kühn). [716] _De Materia Medica_, II. 22, 1, 176 (Kühn). Cf. P. A. Matthiole, _Commentarii in libros sex Pedanii Dioscordis Anazarbei_ (Venetiis, 1554), Bk. II. c. xix. [717] VI. 9. [718] Salpe the midwife recommends this prescription to disguise the age of boys on sale for slaves (Pliny, XXXII. 47). At the end of the chapter the author seems to awake from his trance of trustfulness, in the words, “in the case of _every_ depilatory, the hairs should always be removed before it is applied!” [719] Pliny, XXXII. 18. Belief in the efficacy of fish-nostrums continues unto this day: in the Middle Ages it permeated all classes, and all Europe, _e.g._ Charles IX. of France would never, if he could help it, drink unless a fragment of the tusk of the _narwhal_, or so-called sea-unicorn, were in the cup to counteract a possible poison. [720] Badham, _op. cit._, 83.