With the second century of the Christian era we terminate the creative period of Greek medicine. We are provided with the works of four important writers of this century, of whom three, Rufus of Ephesus, Soranus of Ephesus, and Aretaeus of Cappadocia, though valuable for forming a picture of the state of medicine in their day, were without substantial influence on the course of medicine in later ages. Rufus of Ephesus, a little junior to Dioscorides, has left us the first formal work on human anatomy and is of some importance in the history of comparative anatomy. In medicine he is memorable as the first to have described bubonic plague, and in surgery for his description of the methods of arresting haemorrhage and his knowledge of the anatomy of the eye. A work by him _On gout_ was translated into Latin in the sixth century, but remained unknown till modern times. Soranus of Ephesus (A. D. _c._ 90-_c._ 150), an acute writer on gynaecology, has left a book which illustrates well the anatomy of his day. It exercised an influence for many centuries to come, and a Latin abstract of it prepared about the sixth century by one Moschion has come down to us in an almost contemporary manuscript.[133] It is interesting as opposing the Hippocratic theory that the male embryo is originated in the right and the female in the left half of the womb, a fallacy derived originally from Empedocles and Parmenides, but perpetuated by Latin translations of the Hippocratic treatises until the seventeenth century. His work was adorned by figures, and some of these, naturally greatly altered by copyists, but still not infinitely removed from the facts, have survived in a manuscript of the ninth century, and give us a distant idea of the appearance of ancient anatomical drawings.[134] We may assist our imagination a little further, in forming an idea of what such diagrams were like, with the help of certain other mediaeval figures representing the form and distribution of the various anatomical ‘systems’, veins, arteries, nerves, bones, and muscles which are probably traceable to an Alexandrian origin.[135] [133] Leyden Voss 4ᵒ 9^* of the sixth century is a fragment of this work. [134] V. Rose, _Sorani Ephesii vetus translatio Latina cum additis Graeci textus reliquiis_, Leipzig, 1882; F. Weindler, _Geschichte der gynäkologisch-anatomischen Abbildung_, Dresden, 1908. [135] The discovery and attribution of these figures is the work of K. Sudhoff. A bibliography of his writings on the subject will be found in a ‘Study in Early Renaissance Anatomy’ in C. Singer’s _Studies in the History and Method of Science_, vol. i, Oxford, 1917.