Initiated in the theory and first principles of medicine, as now described, Hippocrates no doubt commenced the practice of his art in the Asclepion of Cos, as his forefathers had done before him. Why he afterwards left the place of his nativity, and visited distant regions of the earth, whither the duties of his profession and the calls of humanity invited him, cannot now be satisfactorily determined. The respect paid to him in his lifetime by the good and wise in all the countries which he visited, and the veneration in which his memory has been held by all subsequent generations, are more than sufficient to confute the base calumny, invented, no doubt, by some envious rival, that he was obliged to flee from the land of his nativity in consequence of his having set fire to the library attached to the Temple of Health, at Cnidos, in order that he might enjoy a monopoly of the knowledge which he had extracted from the records which it had contained.[26] Certain it is, that he afterwards visited Thrace, Delos, Thessaly, Athens, and many other regions, and that he practised, and probably taught, his profession in all these places.[27] There are many traditions of what he did during his long life, but with regard to the truth of them, the greatest diversity of opinion has prevailed in modern times. Thus he is said to have cured Perdiccas, the Macedonian king, of love-sickness; and although there are circumstances connected with this story which give it an air of improbability, it is by no means unlikely that he may have devoted his professional services to the court of Macedonia, since very many of the places mentioned in his works as having been visited by him, such as Pella and Acanthus, are situated in that country; and further, in confirmation of the narrative, it deserves to be mentioned, that there is most satisfactory evidence of his son Thessalus having been court physician to Archelaus, king of Macedonia;[28] and it is well ascertained that another of his descendants, the Fourth Hippocrates, attended Roxane, the queen of Alexander the Great.[29] Our author’s name is also connected with the great plague of Athens, the contagion of which he is reported to have extinguished there and in other places, by kindling fires.[30] The only serious objection to the truth of this story is the want of proper contemporary evidence in support of it. It is no sufficient objection, however, that Thucydides, in his description of the circumstances attending the outbreak of the pestilence in Attica, makes no mention of any services having been rendered to the community by Hippocrates; while, on the contrary, he states decidedly that the skill of the physicians could do nothing to mitigate the severity of this malady. It is highly probable, that, if Hippocrates was actually called upon to administer professional assistance in this way, it must have been during one of the subsequent attacks or exacerbations of the disease which occurred some years afterwards.