It is well known that the oldest documents which we possess relative to the practice of Medicine, are the various treatises contained in the Collection which bears the name of Hippocrates. Their great excellence has been acknowledged in all ages, and it has always been a question which has naturally excited literary curiosity, by what steps the art had attained to such perfection at so early a period. This investigation, however, is attended with peculiar difficulties, and has never been marked by any very satisfactory results. At one time, indeed, it was usual to solve the question by supposing that Greece had derived all the arts and sciences, in a state of considerable advancement, from the oriental nations, who are admitted to have possessed a considerable degree of civilization before the Hellenic race became distinguished for intellectual development.[2] The question with regard to the origin of Medicine was thus supposed to have met with a satisfactory solution. For, it being generally admitted that the Hippocratic Medicine had emerged from the schools of philosophy, and it having been assumed as incontrovertible that the early philosophy of the Greeks had been derived from the East, the inference appeared to be quite legitimate that medicine, in a state of considerable advancement, had been imported from the same quarter. Recent research, however, has cast great doubts on the supposed descent of Grecian philosophy from a foreign source, and it is now pretty generally admitted that the Orientals, in early times, had never made any considerable progress in mental science.[3] Instead, then, of looking upon philosophy as having been an exotic production in the land of Hellas, we have every reason to believe that it was, what its inhabitants, in the noble pride of political freedom and intellectual superiority, boasted that their forefathers had been, namely, “the offspring of their own soil.”[4] Since the philosophy of the Greeks was indigenous, there is every reason to suppose that their medicine was so in like manner. How long the union between medicine and philosophy had subsisted before the time of Hippocrates, has not been determined upon any contemporary evidence, but the disciples of Pythagoras, in after ages, did not hesitate to ascribe to him the honor of effecting this alliance.[5] However this may be, it appears to me very doubtful whether these philosophers ever practised medicine as a craft. Indeed, it is much more likely that they merely speculated upon the phenomena of disease. Thus we shall see afterwards, that Plato himself did not discard speculative medicine from his system of philosophy, although we are quite sure that he never practised it as an art. But this connection between medicine and philosophy was by no means regarded, in after times, as having been favorable to the advancement of the former, for we find Hippocrates complimented by Celsus for having brought about a separation between them.[6]