After the death of the Master, the Hippocratic school tended, as so often happens with the best of cultural movements, to show signs itself of diminishing vitality: the letter began to obscure and hamper the spirit. The comparatively small element of theory which existed in the Hippocratic physiology was made the groundwork of a somewhat over-elaborated "system." Against this tendency on the part of the "Dogmatic" or "Rationalist" school there arose, also at Alexandria, the sect of the Empiricists. "It is not," they said, "the cause but the cure of diseases that concerns us; not how we digest, but what is digestible." [Sidenote: Greek Medicine in Rome.] Horace said "_Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit_." Political domination, the occupation of territory by armies, does not necessarily mean real conquest. Horace's statement applied to medicine as to other branches of culture. The introducer of Greek medicine into Rome was Asclepiades (1st century B.C.). A man of forceful personality, and equipped with a fully developed philosophic system of health and disease which commended itself to the Roman _savants_ of the day, he soon attained to the pinnacle of professional success in the Latin capital: he is indeed to all time the type of the fashionable (and somewhat "faddy") West-end physician. His system was a purely mechanistic one, being based upon the atomic doctrine of Leucippus and Democritus, which had been completed by Epicurus and recently introduced to the Roman public in Lucretius's great poem "_De Rerum Natura_." The disbelief of Asclepiades in the self-maintaining powers of the living organism are exposed and refuted at considerable length by Galen in the volume before us. [Sidenote: The Methodists.] Out of the teaching of Asclepiades that physiological processes depend upon the particular way in which the ultimate indivisible molecules come together ([Greek: en tê poia synodô tôn prôtôn ekeinôn sômatôn tôn apathôn]) there was developed by his pupil, Themison of Laodicea, a system of medicine characterised by the most engaging simplicity both of diagnosis and treatment. This so-called "Methodic" system was intended to strike a balance between the excessive leaning to apriorism shown by the Rationalist (Hippocratic) school and the opposite tendency of the Empiricists. "A pathological theory we must have," said the Methodists in effect, "but let it be simple." They held that the molecular groups constituting the tissues were traversed by minute channels ([Greek: poroi], "pores"); all diseases belonged to one or other of two classes; if the channels were constricted the disease was one of _stasis_ ([Greek: stegnôsis]), and if they were dilated the disease was one of _flux_ ([Greek: rhysis]). Flux and stasis were indicated respectively by increase and diminution of the natural secretions; treatment was of opposites by opposites--of stasis by methods causing dilatation of the channels, and conversely.