22. From the hands of the priests, medicine fell into those of the philosophers. Certain men, of a noble character and more sound understanding, soon began to direct their attention to the study of the rising arts. At first they employed themselves with those which related to their immediate wants. The science of public and private morals was doubtless regarded by them as belonging to this class; and accordingly we see them employing their utmost sagacity in the research of its rules, exerting the strength of their judgment in their delineation, and inculcating with all the commanding powers of their eloquence the advantages which accrue, both to individuals and society in general, from a ra tional but entire obedience to those immutable laws. Natural philosophy, astronomy, and geometry, which sciences were all in their infancy, became at the same time the objects of their contemplation. From this investigation, superficial as it no doubt was, of the different classes of natural phenomena, they acquired the habit of a certain method in their proceedings, which soon became a sort of necessary want to them.

23. When these sages afterwards came to turn their attention to medicine they were able to throw a new light upon the science. Accustomed as they had been to arrange in a certain order the different branches of their knowledge, to trace relations between them, and to connect them together, they perceived how requisite it was to class the indigested mass of medical observations, before they could be subjected with advantage to the test of reasoning. And if, on the one hand, in order to discover some connecting principle among so great a number of facts, it was absolutely necessary to resort to classification; on the other hand it was no less requisite to impress the conclusions which were obtained firmly on the memory, to arrange them, and to express them in the form of general rules.

24. The revolution which these early philosophers effected in the medical art was evidently a work of necessity. The time was come for drawing it forth from the recesses of the temples, and for dissipating at least in part the obscurity in which ignorance and quackery had involved it. If these attempts had done nothing more than bring it fairly to light, they would still have the merit of greatly contributing to its progress. From that time forward, a rational system was substituted in the place of undigested collections of rules; enterprising geniuses began to connect the principles of the science with those of the other branches of human knowledge; and its intimate relation to the different parts of natural and moral philosophy became every day more apparent to minds, whom books could not yet mislead from the path of pure observation.

25. These philosophers then freed medicine from its superstitious and hypocritical character. They transformed an occult and sacerdotal doctrine into a popular science and a common art. This reform was of infinite service both to medicine and philosophy; but it must be confessed that its happy effects were in some degree combined with serious disadvantages. For, in remedying errors, the reformers often fell into a dangerous extreme; not satisfied with applying to medicine

that general and sublime species of philosophy which presides over all the sciences, and which alone is capable of illustrating their principles and operations, they vainly attempted to transfer to it the imaginary laws of their systems of natural philosophy, and various other conjectures which were the most fertile sources of error when thus applied, that the particular objects to which they related had absolutely no connexion with the living system.

26. Thus Pythagoras endeavoured to explain the laws of the animal economy, the formation of diseases, the order of their symptoms, and the action of medicine by the power of numbers. Democritus again referred them to the motions and different relations of figure and position of the primary atoms of matter, while Heraclitus attempted to account for them by the various modifications of which the ovative and preservative fire of the universe is susceptible. It was but natural that the hypothesis which each of them employed for illustrating the production of animated bodies should be also applied by him to explain the series of phenomena brought to view by their spontaneous evolutions, by the agency of external substances, by the changes of which they are susceptible, and by their final destruction, or that alteration of form which we call their death. Hence arose so many futile theories of which we may find examples in the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch, and from which the writings of Hippocrates himself are not wholly exempt. Empedocles, for example, the disciple of Pythagoras, affirmed that the muscular flesh was composed of the four elements combined in equal proportions; he supposed the nerves when cooled by the external air to form the nails; he thought the perspirable matter and tears resulted from the fusion of the blood, and imagined the osseous matter of the system to proceed from the union of earth and water. Timæus of Locris framed a new system of cosmogony, from which he deduced his physiological views and methods of cure. Eudoxus, Epicharmus, Democedes, &c., adopted the opinions of the Italian school founded by Pythagoras, and their system of physic was supported and guided by that philosopher so celebrated, and yet so little understood, even by the ancients; but for which, when we consider its beneficial effects in a moral and political point of view, it is impossible not to be inspired with sentiments of veneration.

27. To conclude: all men of letters, whom a sedentary life and the nature of their labors disposed to melancholy habits, cultivated medicine as a subject of meditation upon themselves. Their habitual valetudinary state obliging them often to invoke its assistance, they had the additional motive of the proper care and preservation of their own health to invite them to the study. Their first acquirements, superficial as they often were, could not fail to prove in active minds the germs of numerous errors. Those among them who did not combine the observation of diseases with their theoretical opinions, such as they had been delivered in the schools by oral communication, or detailed in the small number of written works which existed in those

early times, allowed themselves to be easily deluded by romantic notions; and the custom of ranging and systematising all their ideas rendered their errors more serious and dangerous.

28. Of all the philosophers, who at that time devoted themselves to the study of medicine, no one preserved himself more free from the spirit of hypothesis than Acron of Agrigentum in Sicily. This bold and original genius, whom the empirics of later times have regarded as their chief, was desirous to refer the art of medicine to experience alone. Accordingly, he reduced all the reasonings about disease to the appreciation of the different symptoms which admitted of comparison, and to the discovery of analogies from which he observed that we may often draw the indications of cure. But, although he enjoyed a high reputation in his life time, his opinions could not overcome the ascendancy of more positive and dogmatical theories; and it was not till long after that they became the rallying point of a sect of respectable physicians. Although, too, these opinions were less dangerous when applied to practice than those of his opponents, it is but too certain that a spirit of rivalship carried the adherents of both almost equally far beyond the bounds of reason, which indeed would have easily reconciled them, for the dispute turned, properly speaking, upon mere

words.

29. The philosophers of antiquity then both improved and injured the science of medicine. They rescued it from undiscerning ignorance, but they precipitated it into a variety of hazardous conjectures; they delivered it over from the blindness of empiricism to all the rashness of dogmatism. In short, its lot was the same as that of moral philosophy. Medicine at first, as placed in the hands of the poets, exhibited only an assemblage of beautiful images or refined sentiments; while, in the hands of the priests, it adopted the vague language and mysterious tone of superstition; and, in the hands of those primitive philosophers whose exertions in other respects claim our warmest acknowledgments, its scattered, confused, and undigested materials were combined and formed into more or less regular, and more or less perfect systems; but it usurped the principles of many other sciences which were themselves but in a crude state; it shared in their errors, which proved the more injurious to it, as these sciences had for the most part little connexion with it. We may even venture to assert, that it made in some measure the complete round of the false systems which prevailed in the different branches of human knowledge, and which succeeded each other by turns (Cabanis).

30. We have made this long extract from a modern author, because we think that he has in a happy manner, traced the circumstances of directing the succession of medicine from that of being a symbolical and poetical matter in the first instance, and afterwards a sacerdotal concern, into the hands of those men who were named philosophers in consequence of their seeking to divine the causes of things, and looking deeper than the vulgar into the principles of material phenomena.

31. But philosophers full of desire to penetrate into the secrets of nature, and engaged in investigations on the subject of abstract truth, were likely enough to prove bad physicians on two grounds. In the first place they could not be supposed to have time or disposition to attend minutely to those details which practical medicine demands; and in the next it is in the very nature of philosophical speculation to force analogies into the mind that are of the most fallacious nature. Medicine, then, first in the hands of poets and priests, and subsequently cultivated by men of general science, awaited the birth of a superior .nind who should as it were stamp a peculiarity on its pretensions, and learn, and teach, and practise it as a distinct and separate branch of pursuit.

32. It was this which the far famed Hippocrates did for the science and art of healing, and on this account he has been styled the father and founder of medicine. Hippocrates was a philosopher before he was a physician; but finding, says Le Clerc, that the speculations of natural science were not so likely to benefit society as the practice of medicine, he only retained enough of his first pursuits to enable him to reason justly on the subject of medicine, which he at length made his principal or rather his only study. The original of our quotation runs thus: 'Mais ne jugeant pas que les speculations de cette derniere science (philosophie) fussent aussi utiles a la societé que la pratique de la premiere, il ne retint de la philosophie qu'autant qu'il en fallait pour raisonner justement dans la medicine, dout il fit sa principale, ou plutot son unique etude.'

33. Cabanis expresses the same fact in a more diffuse but in a pleasing and instructive manner. We employ in this instance the translated copy of the French author by Dr. Henderson. Surrounded from his infancy with all the objects of his studies; instructed in eloquence and philosophy by the most celebrated masters; having his mind enriched with the largest collection of observations which could at that time have existed; and endowed in fine by nature with a genius which was at once penetrating and comprehensive, bold, and prudent; he commenced his career under the most favorable auspices, and pursued it during a period of more than eighty years, with that degree of renown which was equally due to his talents and to the greatness of his virtuous character.

34. Euryphion had just published the Cnidian Sentences. Herodicus too by the revival of gymnastic medicine, the original invention of which was ascribed to Esculapius, had given to the art a more regular and scientific form. They knew how to observe diseases, and were acquainted with the most general remedies, such as venæsections, emetics, cathartics, and bathing, the use of incisory instruments, and of the actual cautery or fire; and although a certain routine, numerous false theories, and the influence of superstition, continued to deform the prevailing methods of treatment, yet the glimpses of a happier dawn were perceived at intervals in almost all the branches of medicine.

35. It was in these fortunate circumstances that Hippocrates appeared as it were on a sudden, and procured to the Coan school a lasting pre-eminence to which it was doubtless well entitled, since it had been able to produce such rare talents. Amid the sports of childhood he received from the mouth of his parents the elementary notions of medical science; by viewing diseases he learned to distinguish them; by witnessing the preparations and employment of medicines, their use and their virtues became equally familiar to him. The first objects which strike the young and curious senses, the first comparisons which they suggest to the infant mind, the first judgments of growing reason, have a greater influence on the remaining part of life, as the traces which they leave, and the habits which they form, are for the most part indelible. It is then that the bent of the character, and the particular cast or direction of the operations of the mind, are determined. To the fatal disposition to satisfy ourselves with words, and to affix to those we employ erroneous or vague ideas of the things they were meant to express, may perhaps in a great measure be ascribed the custom of constantly figuring to ourselves objects which we have never seen, and of substituting the fictions of the imagination for the works of reality. A sound habit of judgment depends upon the justness and accuracy of the sensations; and the organs which are designed for the reception of the latter require culture, that is, a well directed employment. Now as nature or the objects surrounding us are our proper teachers, and as their instructions differ from those of men or books in this respect that they are always adapted to our faculties, they are consequently the only ones which are seldom or never fruitless, and the only ones which never mislead us. We must therefore in general early familiarise ourselves with the images which are destined afterwards to furnish the materials of all our judgments; and, with regard to each in particular, the man who devotes himself to it cannot place himself too soon among the objects of his studies, or in that situation which is the most suitable to the nature and design of his observations.

36. Hippocrates was not less favored by circumstances than by nature. The latter had endowed him with the most happy frame of body; the former furnished him from his earliest infancy with every thing which could most successfully contribute to his education.

37. Good sense, joined to the faculty of invention, is the distinguishing characteristic of a small number of privileged men. Hippocrates was of this number. He saw that too much and yet not enough had been done for medicine, and he accordingly separated it from philosophy, to which they had not been able to unite it by their true and reciprocal relations. He brought the science back into its natural channel, that of rational experience. However, as he himself observes, he introduced both these sciences into each other, for he regarded them as inseparable, but he assigned to them relations which were altogether new. In a word, he freed medicine from false theories, and formed for it sure and

solid systems; this, he with justice said, was to render medicine philosophical. On the other hand he elucidated moral and natural philosophy by the light of medical science. This we may with propriety call with him the introduction of one into the other. Such then was the general outline of his plan.

38. The fame of the existing schools (says Dr. Parr in his Medical Dictionary) was soon eclipsed by Hippocrates, who seemed to have been the first to whom the appellation of physician in its modern acceptation is due. He first separated it from philosophy, gave it the form of a distinct science, and personally observed the progress of disease as well as the effects of remedies; on this account he is esteemed the inventor of the medicina clinica Yet perhaps the philosophers who preceded him must not be wholly omitted. We are reminded of Pythagoras, by the Climacterics, by the critical days, and his recommendation of vinegar of squills in deafness; of his scholar Alemaon, who first described the eye; of Empedocles, who, before any other anatomist, dissected with accuracy the ear; and of Timæus Locrus, who taught that the nervous system was the basis of the whole body on which the nutritious system was gradually extended. Democritus was rather a philosopher and a chemist than a physician, and might have ranked with credit in each class, were the various hints of his labors collected.

39. Of Hippocrates, continues Dr. Parr, it is difficult to speak impartially in a manner that will satisfy his warm admirers, or those who reject every thing that is not of a modern era and if we look at him as a physician when medicine had scarcely escaped from the trammels of superstition, the refinements of philosophy, or the dictates of antiquated tradition, our admiration will rise almost to enthusiasm; for we shall perceive sound judgment, accuracy of reasoning, and acuteness of observation, superior to his era or the state of science at that period. But to study and admire Hippocrates at this time is very different. Science has opened newer and more extensive views, diseases are distinguished with greater accuracy, and the remedies as they are more numerous may be more appropriately adapted to the circumstances. If we find a striking description in Hippocrates we admire it as a mark of superior genius, and wonder how the same event could have happened both in Greece and England. Yet strip the fact of the disguise of system and it will be found that patient observation would alone have taught it. He fills however so vast a space in the medical scene that some further notice of him and his doctrines will be necessary.

40. Hippocrates was born in the first year of the eightieth Olympiad, 460 years before the birth of Christ, and was descended from a line of physicians, inheriting the instructions of his father and grandfather, themselves descendants from the Asclepiada, while his mother traced her origin from the Heraclida: he died at Larissa it is said at the age of ninety. He first practised physic at Thasus, afterwards at Abdera, and at last in Thessaly; but his chief residence was at Cos, where the Coan school became for a long

time the successful rival of the Cnidian. All that has been added to these few events is doubt ful. That his instructors were Herodicus or Prodicus, and Democritus, rests only on the attention which he has paid to the gymnastic art as well as to anatomy; and the philosophy of Hippocrates is more nearly allied to the tenets of Heraclitus than of the Abderite. As Hippocrates was a great traveller, he might have attended the lessons of Prodicus in Athens, where he chiefly taught; and might there have been acquainted with his brother Gorgias whom he afterwards attended in his medical capacity in Thessaly when worn down with oldage; but we have no records of his having ever practised at Athens. 41.. It is not very easy to form a true estimate of the anatomical knowledge and physiological science of Hippocrates. Some of these subjects are treated of in works which are attributed by some to him, and by others are deemed spurious. Le Clerc, however, has taken pains to distinguish these; and the following outline will be very little else than an abridged translation of the work of that learned and laborious author.

42. The doctrine of the four primary qualities of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness, seems to have been held by Hippocrates, and of the primary elements air, water, fire, and earth: he also supposes, and reasons upon the supposition of a leading principle to which he gives the name of nature, about the operations of which he occasionally speaks somewhat vaguely, but in consistency with the spirit and temper of the times, which too much confounded the ideas of final with physical or efficient cause; and which supposed the invention of a term the development of a principle. Indeed if we are to believe the treatises de Flatibus, de Carnibus, de naturâ Hominis, de naturâ Pueri, and de Dietâ to be the productions of Hippocrates we must believe that some of his positions respecting the formation of the hard and the soft parts of the body, from the different elements and qualities and principles in nature, to be of the most whimsical and futile kind.

43. With respect to the anatomical researches and science of Hippocrates it appears, to say the best, very doubtful whether he ever actually witnessed the dissection of the human subject. In the book de Alimento we find it stated that the veins originate in the liver, as the arteries do from the heart. In another part he talks of two orders of vessels proceeding from the heart, namely, the veins and the arteries or rather the roots of these as single vessels. At this time, indeed, the word vein was generally applied to vessels containing blood, and artery to those which were supposed to contain air, Aornoin, ало тоν тоν αɛρa Tηpe. In the description of the heart ascribed to Hippocrates we find it stated that the organ is of a pyramidical figure, of a red color, that it is every where enveloped by a tunic, between which and the heart's substance a small quantity of water is found similar to the urine, that it is a strong muscle, that it has two ventricles, and that it has internal membranes of an admirable structure. And, when he passes from description into the physiology of the heart and connecting vessels, we find some faint inti

mations of a circulatory movement: all the veins, he says, have a general communication, by which communication nourishment is conveyed through the whole body; and he further supposes or speaks of a rest of vessels-which, say his commentators, necessarily imply the notion of movement or circulation. It is curious that, when adverting to the return or reflux of the humors from the surface to the centre of the body, he makes use of a word which was employed to express the motion of the tides, auшτ; from which it has been fairly inferred that Hippocrates although not fully acquainted with the transmission of the blood from, and its return te, the heart, had some faint impression or vague notion that such exit and reflux was effected; indeed the more enthusiastic admirers of the great man concerning whom we are now speaking have not hesitated to say that the modern doctrine of the circulation was known to him; but it is evident, and Le Clerc very properly insists upon this fact when discussing the question, it is evident that this flux and reflux was considered by Hippocrates as effected by the same order of vessels; and the way altogether in which the subject of the motion of the blood and humors is spoken of has a confusedness and vagueness of manner, which is very different from the precision and clearness of the present day doctrine.

44. Neurology, or the doctrine of the nerves, as taught by Hippocrates, was perhaps still more vague and indistinct in reference to its comparison with the physiology of modern times. Nerves, tendons, and ligaments, are evidently confounded together in his writings; and with respect to the brain, and its connexions with other parts of the body, we do not find any thing upon which the modern anatomist can rest with much pleasure, or which modern physiology can recognise as clear and distinct. Hippocrates places the brain among the glands, inasmuch as it appears of the same nature with other glandular substances, being like the glands generally white, and friable, and spongy; and he supposes that the brain charges itself with the superfluous humors of the body as do the other glands, being as they are spongy, and therefore capable of easily absorbing. He moreover imagines its power of absorption from its form and situation, and considers it to be attractive of the body's moisture, which rises into it as vapor, until such time as it becomes surcharged, when this moisture is again transmitted to different parts of the body, more especially to the glands, whence come fluxions and catarrhs.

45. With respect to the other uses of the brain, Hippocrates speaks of it in some of his writings, in his book de Morbo Sacro, for instance, as the seat of understanding and wisdom; although in other places, as in his book de Corde, we find the seat of understanding (yvwun) lodged in the left ventricle of the heart. It should be observed that our author speaks of two membranous coverings to the brain, the one thick and the other fine in its structure.

46. The organs of sense are described by Hippocrates in the following manner:-The ears have a hole which penetrates as far as a dry and

hard bone, to which is united a fistulous cavity, or an oblique kind of canal, at the entrance of which a very fine and dry cuticle is found, the dryness of which as well as that of the bone produces sound; the air being beaten back as well by the bone as the membrane. On the organ of smell he thus expresses himself:-The brain being moist possesses the faculty of sending out an odor, or of smelling, by drawing the odor of hard materials in with the air which traverses certain dry bodies; the brain itself extending into the nasal cavities. In this organ we find no bone as in the ear, but merely a cartilage similar to a sponge, which cannot well be considered either bone or flesh. When treating of the eye, he speaks of small and very delicate veins which are conveyed into the organ by means of a membrane which envelopes the brain. These veins carry to the eye a very pure humor which comes from the brain. There are, he adds, three membranes enveloping the eye itself; the outer one the thickest, the middle one the most tenuous, and the third which preserves the humidity or the humor of the eye is very loose. If the first be injured the eye is affected, if the second is torn or broken it places the organ in great danger, and it projects like a bladder; but the third is the membrane an injury to which is the most mischievous, on account of its office being that of preserving the humor. The rationale of vision is accounted for very obscurely, and a vein is talked of as being sent from the membrane of the brain and conveying a humor which forms diaphonous, and reflecting membranes. It is very obvious, from the mode in which our author expresses himself in reference to these points, that he had no proper conception of the transmission of the optic nerve; and that he confounds the notions of nerve, and vein, and membranes, and humors, in a way that is any thing out precise and clear anatomy or physiology.

47. The muscular fibre and flesh are likewise described with considerable vagueness; he describes the œsophagus as a tube which extends from the tongue to the stomach; the stomach itself is spoken of as a paunch in which the septic process goes on (Koiλin onπtexn), or where coction (g) takes place; this coction or digestion being effected, according to him, by the heat of the stomach, which he describes as connected with the liver from which proceeds the necessary heat. It appears that Hippocrates only talks particularly of two intestines, the first attached to the stomach twelve cubits long, always folded and suspended by the mesocolon, which is itself attached to the nerves, which come from the spine of the back, and which pass under the abdomen; the second intestine is covered with a good deal of flesh, is porous, and terminates at the anus.

48. The liver is described as more abounding in blood than the other viscera, and as having two avenues or gates; he talks of its division into five lobes, and as being the origin of the venous system. He speaks of bronchiæ as passing from the heart to the liver, together with the great vein of the organ. He assigns to this organ, the liver, the office of separating the bile, and, as we before remarked, supplying the stomach with heat.

49. The spleen is spoken of as similar in its form to the impression of a man's foot, and as receiving a vein which ramifies into its substance. The organ is, he says, suspended by the omentum which it supplies with blood. He says that it is fibrous, soft, and spongy, and that it draws from the stomach by its spongy consistence part of the fluid from the stomach, to which it is attached; the rest of the fluid being attracted by the urinary bladder.

50. The lungs, according to Hippocrates, have like the liver five lobes; they are spongy, and attract moisture from neighbouring parts. The diaphragm is named by him povec, under the notion that it was the seat of intelligence, dividing as it were this locality with the heart; but this office was not universally ascribed to the organ in question, even during the life-time of our author, and it is even contested in a work which has been attributed to Hippocrates himself.

51. The kidneys are placed, by Hippocrates, among the glands; he speaks, as we have above intimated, of their attracting part of the fluids of the stomach. The vesiculæ seminales are mentioned as bodies lying on each side of the urinary bladder, and containing the semen. The organs of generation are rudely delineated in either sex; and the mode in which conception and gestation are effected is traced in a very fanciful and hypothetical manner. We may probably have to allude to our author's notions on these particulars in the article PHYSIOLOGY.

52. When considering the general principles of health and disorder, Hippocrates refers to the four supposed humors, viz. the blood, the phlegm, the yellow bile, and the black bile; the impulse or moving power of these several humors being a spirit, which partakes of the nature of air. The above four humors existing in due proportions, constitute health; disease resulting from a disproportion in either one or more, or an undue impetus in the motion of one or the other, occasions disease without reference to change of quantity. The excitants of disease are air, food, and drink, sleep and watching, exercise and repose, things whichare expelled from the body, those which are retained, and the passions of the mind. He also speaks of the reception of exterior substances, as of poisons and venomous animals; but the principal source of disease, according to our author, are aliments and air. Both on the subject of dietetics and of air, Hippocrates therefore treats largely; and, in conformity with the spirit of the times, he supposes heavenly influence to have a share in the immediate production of certain maladies, but it must be admitted that he gave as little as possible into the superstitious notion of celestial workings; and indeed in the book De Morbo Sacro it is expressly stated that we ought not to attach the idea of divine origin to one disorder more than another, for all maladies are in one sense divine, and in another human. Respecting, however, the authenticity of this book, there are, as before stated, some doubts.

53. The modern distinction of diseases into chronic and acute was observed by Hippocrates, and he distinguished them moreover into endemic, or those which are peculiar to a people; epidemic, or those which visit masses of