tten
nine hundred years before Hippocrates was born, sums up the knowledge of
previous periods relating to obstetric surgery, to general pathology, to
the treatment of insanity, to infantile diseases, to toxicology, to
personal hygiene, and to diseases of the generative functions.

Thus Hippocrates, the father of European medicine, must have derived his
knowledge not merely from his own observations, but from the writings of
men unknown to us and from systems practised for an indefinite period.
The real founders of Greek medicine are fabled characters, like Hercules
and Aesculapius,--that is, benefactors whose fictitious names alone
have descended to us. They are mythical personages, like Hermes and
Chiron. Twelve hundred years before Christ temples were erected to
Aesculapius in Greece, the priests of which were really physicians, and
the temples themselves hospitals. In them were practised rites
apparently mysterious, but which modern science calls by the names of
mesmerism, hydropathy, the use of mineral springs, and other essential
elements of empirical science. And these temples were also medical
schools. That of Cos gave birth to Hippocrates, and it was there that
his writings were begun. Pythagoras--for those old Grecian philosophers
were the fathers of all wisdom and knowledge, in mathematics and
empirical sciences as well as philosophy itself--studied medicine in the
schools of Egypt, Phoenicia, Chaldaea, and India, and came in conflict
with sacerdotal power, which has ever been antagonistic to new ideas in
science. He travelled from town to town as a teacher or lecturer,
establishing communities in which _medicine_ as well as _numbers_
was taught.

The greatest name in medical science in ancient or in modern times, the
man who did the most to advance it, the greatest medical genius of whom
we have any early record, was Hippocrates, born on the island of Cos,
460 B.C., of the great Aesculapian family. He received his instruction
from his father. We know scarcely more of his life than we do of Homer
himself, although he lived in the period of the highest splendor of
Athens. Even his writings, like those of Homer, are thought by some to
be the work of different men. They were translated into Arabic, and were
no slight means of giving an impulse to the Saracenic schools of the
Middle Ages in that science in which the Saracens especially excelled.
The Hippocratic collection consists of more than sixty works, which