The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
[57] This fragment has been published in vol. iii, part 1, of the
_Supplementum Aristotelicum_ by H. Diels as _Anonymi Londinensis ex
Aristotelis Iatricis Menonis et Aliis Medicis Eclogae_, Berlin,
1893. See also H. Bekh and F. Spät, _Anonymus Londinensis, Auszuge
eines Unbekannten aus Aristoteles-Menons Handbuch der Medizin_,
Berlin, 1896.
[58] As we go to press there appears a preliminary account of the
very remarkable Edwin Smith papyrus, see J. H. Breasted in _Recueil
d'études egyptologiques dédiées à la mémoire de Champollion_, Paris
1922, and _New York Historical Society Bulletin_, 1922.
[59] It is tempting, also, to connect the Asclepian snake cult with
the prominence of the serpent in Minoan religion.
The earliest medical school of which we have definite information is
that of Cnidus, a Lacedaemonian colony in Asiatic Doris. Its origin may
perhaps reach back to the seventh century B. C. We have actual records
that the teachers of Cnidus were accustomed to collect systematically
the phenomena of disease, of which they had produced a very complex
classification, and we probably possess also several of their actual
works. The physicians of Cos, their only contemporary critics whose
writings have survived, considered that the Cnidian physicians paid too
much attention to the actual sensations of the patient and to the
physical signs of the disease. The most important of the Cnidian
doctrines were drawn up in a series of _Sentences_ or Aphorisms, and
these, it appears, inculcated a treatment along Egyptian lines of the
symptom or at most the disease, rather than the patient, a statement
borne out by the contents of the gynaecological works of probable
Cnidian origin included in the so-called 'Hippocratic Collection'. A few
names of Cnidian physicians have, moreover, come down to us with titles
of their works, and a later statement that they practised anatomy. There
can be little doubt too that the Cnidian school drew also on Persian and
Indian Medicine.
The origin of the school of the neighbouring island of Cos was a little
later than that of Cnidus and probably dates from the sixth century B.
C. Of the Coan school, or at least of the general tendencies that it
represented, we have a magnificent and copious literary monument in the
Corpus Hippocraticum, a collection which was probably put together in
the early part of the third century B. C. by a commission of Alexandrian
scholars at the order of the book-loving Ptolemy Soter (reigned 323-285
B. C.). The elements of which this collection is composed are of varying
dates from the sixth to the fourth century B. C., and of varying value
and origin, but they mainly represent the point of view of physicians
of the eastern part of the Greek world in the fifth and fourth
centuries.
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