So far as history furnishes us with any information on the subject, the Nestorians who lived in Persia, Syria and Mesopotamia were Christians of a remarkably liberal type. They appear to have been an unusually peaceable people, for not only were they kindly disposed toward one another, but they seem to have been on the best of terms with their Jewish neighbors, who, like themselves, were eager after knowledge. Already at a very early period there existed at Djondisabour--a town which had been founded in the Province of Khorassan, in the northeastern part of Persia, about the year 260 A. D., by Sapor II., King of that country--a school in which the medicine of Hippocrates was taught. Freind, in his “History of Physick” (London, 1727), says that about the year 272 A. D. the Emperor Aurelian (Lucius Domitius Aurelianus), as a compliment to his daughter, who was the wife of the King of Persia, sent to Djondisabour, the city in which she resided, several Greek physicians; and Abulpharagius, the Arab historian (thirteenth century), intimates that these were the men who conducted the teaching in the newly established medical school. Another possibility suggests itself. After the death of Alexander the Great in Babylon (323 B. C.), from malarial fever, it is not unlikely that some of the numerous Greek physicians who accompanied the army in an official character, and who, we are warranted in believing, were exceptionally well educated, decided not to remain in that unhealthy district, but to settle in some of the neighboring towns (_e.g._, Nisibis in the hill country to the north of Babylon, or Sura to the east of the river Tigris); and that these men also contributed their share toward the planting and perpetuation of Greek medicine in this district of the Orient. However, the salient fact in this period of the history of medicine is this: When Almansur, the Caliph of Bagdad (712 to 775 A. D.), made up his mind to introduce Greek medicine into his kingdom and looked around for the ways and means of accomplishing this, he found at the city of Djondisabour men who were not only well versed in Greek medicine, but who at the same time were so thoroughly grounded in all departments of scholarship that they could at once begin the work of translating the writings of Hippocrates and other classical medical authors into Arabic, the language of the Mohammedans. But at this stage of affairs the existence of a serious obstacle was discovered. The writings which it was proposed to translate were not immediately obtainable, and it therefore became necessary to institute without delay a vigorous search for the books required. In order that the reader may appreciate fully the difficulties which Almansur had to overcome, in this matter of a scarcity of Greek originals, it seems best to pause at this point, and to review briefly some of the facts which bear upon the question at issue.