Before parting with the Hippocratic physician a word must be said as to his therapeutic means. His general armoury may be described as resembling that of the modern physician of about two generations ago. During those two generations we have, it is true, added to our list of effective remedies but, on the other hand, there has been by common consent a return to the Hippocratic simplicity of treatment. After rest and quiet the central factor in treatment was Dietetics. This science regarded the age—‘Old persons use less nutriment than young’; the season—‘In winter abundant nourishment is wholesome, in summer a more frugal diet’; the bodily condition—‘Lean persons should take little food, but this little should be fat, fat persons on the other hand should take much food, but it should be lean’. Respect was also paid to the digestibility of different foods—‘white meat is more easily digestible than dark’—and to their preparation. Water, barley water, and lime water were recommended as drinks. The dietetic principles of the Hippocratics, especially in connexion with fevers, are substantially those of the present day, and it may be said that the general medical tendency of the last generation in these matters has been an even closer approximation to the Hippocratic. ‘The more we nourish unhealthy bodies the more we injure them’; ‘The sick upon whom fever seizes with the greatest severity from the very outset, must at once subject themselves to a rigid diet’; ‘Complete abstinence often acts well, if the strength of the patient can in any way sustain it’; yet ‘We should examine the strength of the sick, to see whether they be in condition to maintain this spare diet to the crisis of the disease’. ‘In the application of these rules we must always be mindful of the strength of the patient and of the course of each particular disease, as well as of the constitution and ordinary mode of life in each disease.’ Besides diet the Hippocratic physician had at his disposal a considerable variety of other remedies. Baths, inunctions, clysters, warm and cold suffusions, massage and gymnastic, as well as gentler exercise are among them. He probably employed cupping and bleeding rather too freely, and we have several representations of the instruments used for these operations (fig. 8). He was no great user of drugs and seldom names them except, we may note, in the works on the treatment of women, which are probably of Cnidian origin and whence the greater part of the 300 constituents of the Hippocratic pharmacopœia are derived. Thus his list of drugs is small, but several known to him are still used by us. [Illustration: Fig. 7. ATHENIAN FUNERARY MONUMENT Second century A. D. British Museum Inscription reads: ‘Jason, also called Dekmos, the Acharnian, a physician’, followed by his genealogy. By side of patient stands a cupping vessel.]