Biology -- Greece -- History; Medicine, Greek and Roman
have actually come down to us.
[101] This fragment has been published in vol. iii, part 1, of the
_Supplementum Aristotelicum_ by H. Diels as _Anonymi Londinensis ex
Aristotelis Iatricis Menonis et Aliis Medicis Eclogae_, Berlin, 1893.
See also H. Bekh and F. Spät, _Anonymus Londinensis, Auszüge eines
Unbekannten aus Aristoteles-Menons Handbuch der Medizin_, Berlin, 1896.
[102] It is tempting, also, to connect the Asclepian snake cult with
the prominence of the serpent in Minoan religion.
The earliest medical school of which we have definite information is
that of Cnidus, a Lacedaemonian colony in Asiatic Doris. Its origin may
perhaps reach back to the seventh century B. C. We have actual records
that the teachers of Cnidus were accustomed to collect systematically
the phenomena of disease, of which they had produced a very complex
classification, and we probably possess also several of their actual
works. The physicians of Cos, their only contemporary critics whose
writings have survived, considered that the Cnidian physicians paid
too much attention to the actual sensations of the patient and to
the physical signs of the disease. The most important of the Cnidian
doctrines were drawn up in a series of _Sentences_ or Aphorisms, and
these, it appears, inculcated a treatment along Egyptian lines of the
symptom or at most the disease, rather than the patient, a statement
borne out by the contents of the gynaecological works of probable
Cnidian origin included in the so-called ‘Hippocratic Collection’.
A few names of Cnidian physicians have, moreover, come down to us
with titles of their works, and a later statement that they practised
anatomy. There can be little doubt too that the Cnidian school drew
also on Persian and Indian Medicine.
The origin of the school of the neighbouring island of Cos was a little
later than that of Cnidus and probably dates from the sixth century
B. C. Of the Coan school, or at least of the general tendencies that
it represented, we have a magnificent and copious literary monument
in the Corpus Hippocraticum, a collection which was probably put
together in the early part of the third century B. C. by a commission
of Alexandrian scholars at the order of the book-loving Ptolemy Soter
(reigned 323-285 B. C.). The elements of which this collection is
composed are of varying dates from the sixth to the fourth century B.
C., and of varying value and origin, but they mainly represent the
point of view of physicians of the eastern part of the Greek world in
the fifth and fourth centuries.
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