Jaundice is recognised as arising from retention of the bile, dropsy from suppression of the urine. The Talmudists divided dropsy into anasarca, ascites, and tympanites. Rupture and atrophy of the kidneys were held to be always fatal. Hydatids of the liver were more favourably considered. Suppuration of the spinal cord, induration of the lungs, etc., are incurable. Dr. Baas[195] says that these are “views which may have been based on the dissection of [dead] animals, and may be considered the germs of pathological anatomy.” Some critical symptoms are sweating, sneezing, defecation, and dreams, which promise a favourable termination of the disease. Natural remedies, both external and internal, were employed. Magic was also Talmudic. Dispensations were given by the Rabbis to permit sick persons to eat prohibited food. Onions were prescribed for worms; wine and pepper for stomach disorders; goat’s milk for difficulty of breathing; emetics in nausea; a mixture of gum and alum for menorrhagia (not a bad prescription); a dog’s liver was ordered for the bite of a mad dog. Many drugs, such as assafœtida, are evidently adopted from Greek medicine. The dissection of the bodies of animals provided the Talmudists with their anatomy. It is, however, recorded that Rabbi Ishmael, at the close of the first century, made a skeleton by boiling of the body of a prostitute. We find that dissection in the interests of science was permitted by the Talmud. The Rabbis counted 252 bones in the human skeleton. It was known that the spinal cord emerges from the foramen magnum, and terminates in the cauda equina. The anatomy of the uterus was well understood. A very curious point in their anatomy was the assumption of the existence of a fabulous bone, called “Luz,” which they held to be the nucleus of the resurrection of the body.[196] (The Arabians call this bone “Aldabaran.”) They discovered that the removal of the spleen is not necessarily fatal. According to the Talmudists, the elementary bodies are earth, air, fire, and water. Pregnancy, they held, lasts 270 to 273 days (280 days is the modern calculation), and that it cannot be determined before the fourth month. Alexandrian philosophic thought received a new impulse in consequence of the conciliatory policy which the Ptolemies pursued towards the Jews. Under Soter they were encouraged to settle in Alexandria, and soon their numbers became very great. Egypt at one time contained altogether some 200,000 Jews. Alexandria became for several centuries the centre of Jewish thought and learning. But the learning of the Rabbis became a shallow pedantry in the course of time, and their faith in the inspiration of their scriptures ultimately degenerated into a Cabalism, which in its turn lent itself to jugglery and magic-mongering, and infected the medicine of the Roman world, just as the healing art had emancipated itself from superstition, theurgy, and philosophical sophistries.