Ancient authorities differ as to the respective order in which the schools of the Asclepiads should be esteemed. Rhodes, Cos, and Cnidos continually disputed for the pre-eminence, Cos and Cnidos acquiring great fame by their conflicting opinions. According to Galen, the first place must be conceded to Cos, as having produced the greatest number of excellent disciples, amongst whom was Hippocrates; he ranks Cnidos next. Cos (B.C. 600) was the objective school, and devoted its studies chiefly to symptomatology. It asked, what can we see of the patient’s disorder? of what does he complain? what, in fact, are his symptoms? This is practical medicine, though not so much in accordance with modern scientific medicine as the method of Cnidos, the subjective school. There the aim was to make a correct diagnosis; to find out what was behind the symptoms, what caused the morbid appearances; what it was that the sensations of the patient indicated; and its aim was not to treat symptoms so much as to treat vigorously the disorder which caused them. Auscultation, or the art of scientifically listening to the sounds of the chest, those of the lungs in breathing, and of the heart in beating, was to some extent understood and practised at Cnidos. The medical school of Crotona was in the highest repute 500 B.C., probably on account of its connection with the Pythagoreans. The school of Rhodes does not seem to have had a long life. That of Cyrene was famous on account not only of its medical teaching, but from the fact that mathematics and philosophy were industriously pursued there. The teaching in all these schools must have been of a very high order; for, though unfortunately little of it has descended directly to us, we have sufficient evidence of its importance in such fragments as are to be found incorporated with the works of Hippocrates, such as the _Coan Prognostics_ and the _Cnidian Sentences_; the former, a miscellaneous collection of the observations made by the physician of Cos, and the latter, a work attributed to Euryphon, a celebrated physician of Cnidos (about the former half of the fifth century B.C.). Experiment and observation were insisted upon in the study of anatomy and physiology. Galen tells us in his second book, _On Anatomical Manipulations_: “I do not blame the ancients, who did not write books on anatomical manipulations; though I praise Marinus, who did. For it was superfluous for them to compose such records for themselves or others, while they were, from their childhood, exercised by their parents in dissecting, just as familiarly as in writing and reading; so that there was no more fear of their forgetting their anatomy than of their forgetting their alphabet. But when grown men, as well as children, were taught, this thorough discipline fell off; and, the art being carried out of the family of the Asclepiads, and declining by repeated transmission, books became necessary for the student.”