"When," says Littré, "one searches into the history of medicine and the commencement of science, the first body of doctrine that one meets with is the collection of writings known under the name of the works of Hippocrates. The science mounts up directly to that origin, and there stops. Not that it had not been cultivated earlier, and had not given rise to even numerous productions; but everything that had been made before the physician of Cos has perished. We have only remaining of them scattered and unconnected fragments. The works of Hippocrates have alone escaped destruction; and by a singular circumstance there exists a great gap after them as well as before them. The medical works from Hippocrates to the establishment of the School of Alexandria, and those of that school itself, are completely lost, except some quotations and passages preserved in the later writers; so that the writings of Hippocrates remain alone amongst the ruins of ancient medical literature." Sydenham said of Hippocrates: "He it is whom we can never duly praise," and refers to him as "that divine old man," and "the Romulus of medicine, whose heaven was the empyrean of his art." Hippocrates died in Thessaly, but at what age is uncertain, for different authors have credited him with a lifetime of from eighty-five to a hundred and nine years. By virtue of his fame, death for him was not the Great Leveller. Hippocrates had two sons, Thessalus and Draco; the former was physician to Archelaus, King of Macedonia, the latter physician to the wife of Alexander the Great. They were the founders of the School of Dogmatism which was based mainly on the teaching and aphorisms of Hippocrates. The Dogmatic Sect emphasized the importance of investigating not the obvious but the underlying and hidden causes of disease and held undisputed sway until the foundation of the Empirical Sect at Alexandria. FOOTNOTES: [5] _Vide_ "History of Gynæcology," by W. J. Stewart McKay. Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1901. [6] _Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin_, May, 1912. CHAPTER IV. PLATO, ARISTOTLE, THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA AND EMPIRICISM. Plato--Aristotle--Alexandrian School--Its Origin--Its Influence-- Lithotomy--Herophilus--Erasistratus--Cleombrotus--Chrysippos-- Anatomy--Empiricism--Serapion of Alexandria. Two very eminent philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, were influenced by the teaching of Hippocrates. _Plato_ (B.C. 427-347) was a profound moralist, and though possessed of one of the keenest intellects of all time, did little to advance medical science. He did not practise medicine, but studied it as a branch of philosophy, and instead of observing and investigating, attempted to solve the problems of health and disease by intuition and speculation. His conceptions were inaccurate and fantastic.