The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800Buck, Albert H. (Albert Henry)
History
The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800
Buck, Albert H. (Albert Henry)
Medicine -- History
The further history of the medical sects which flourished under the
Ptolemies and for a short time afterward, when Alexandria became
a colony of the Roman Empire, need not detain us long. Daremberg
furnishes a chronological chart of the physicians who played a more
or less prominent part in the work of these sects, and from this
it appears that they numbered thirty-four in all--ten followers of
Herophilus, fourteen of Erasistratus, and ten Empirics. Callamachur
and Bacchius, who belonged to the first of these groups, deserve to be
mentioned because they were its most distinguished members and because
they were the first physicians who wrote commentaries on the writings
of Hippocrates. In the sect of the Empirics the next in importance
after Philinus of Cos is Serapion of Alexandria. Mantias, another
disciple of Herophilus, gained considerable reputation from the fact
that he was the first to collect together into a single treatise the
different pharmaceutical formulae that were then in general use. He was
also an authoritative writer on surgical topics.
_Certain Branches of Medical Work Begin to Assume more Distinctly
the Character of Specialties._--At the time of Hippocrates there
were no specialists, or at least none who received any sort of official
recognition from the general body of physicians; and yet, there were,
even then, a few practitioners who devoted themselves preferably to
the treatment of certain maladies, like the affections of the eye and
the teeth; and, beside these, there were undoubtedly, in the larger
communities, men who were ready and competent to undertake the more
serious surgical operations. But even these men, as appears from the
language of the so-called Hippocratic oath, could not honorably perform
an operation for stone in the bladder; this particular work having been
left from time immemorial entirely in the hands of the lithotomists, a
class of men who performed no other kind of surgery and who, in fact,
were considered outside the pale of the medical profession--merely
surgical artisans.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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