Others besides the Egyptians regarded Sirius with favor;[313] as, for example, the Parsis, to whom it was “Tystria, the bright and glorious star.”[314] In Greece, however, it was not regarded as propitious. To it were attributed certain diseases. Thus, Homer, who calls it Orion’s dog, says:— “His burning breath Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death.”[315] Remembering the medical history of Sirius, it is worth while recalling that the “dog-days,” those extending from about the 22d of July to the 23d of August, are often spoken of as the physician’s holiday. [Illustration: FIG. 11.—ANUBIS.] One very often hears that THOTH was to the Egyptians the god of medicine, just as Æsculapius was to the Greeks and Romans. Even the late Dr. Aitken Meigs, a scholarly physician, accepted this idea. In an address, to be referred to later, he says: “Æsculapius is, doubtless, the Egyptian Thoth, or Hermes Trismegistus, whose symbols, the staff and twining serpent, surmounted with the mystic hawk of Horus-Ra and the solar uræus,[316] appear in the ancient temple Pselcis, near Dakkeh, in Nubia.” The Doctor is about as wide of the mark as Forbes Winslow, when he says that the Grecian “Apollo and Minerva answered to the Isis and Osiris of the Egyptians; and Orpheus, the priest, poet, and physician, usurped the place of Thoth.”[317] HERMES, THOTH, or THOT, the TET or TAAUTES of the Phœnicians, was not the god of medicine among the Egyptians, any more than he was the god of any other special branch of knowledge. He was the patron god of all kinds of learning. Says Ebers: “The discovery of nearly every science is attributed to the ibis-headed god, Thoth, the writer or clerk of heaven, whom the Greeks compared to their god, Hermes.”[318] It is no doubt true, however, that Hermes was credited with taking considerable interest in medical matters. He was said to have been the author of six books on the healing art, in which anatomy, pathology, and therapeutics were treated of, together with diseases of the eye,—a part of the body which has always suffered much in Egypt. Ebers remarks that “the book on the use of medicine has been preserved to the present day in the ‘Papyrus-Ebers.’”[319]