nts in an expected coming of a national temporal Messiah had
brought those who were now advanced in intellectual progress to a just
appreciation of ancient traditions. In this mental emancipation their
physicians took the lead. For long, while their pursuits were yet in
infancy, a bitter animosity had been manifested toward them by the
Levites, whose manner of healing was by prayer, expiatory sacrifice, and
miracle; or, if they descended to less supernatural means, by an
application of such remedies as are popular with the vulgar everywhere.
Thus, to a person bitten by a mad dog, they would give the diaphragm of
a dog to eat. As examples of a class of men soon to take no obscure
share in directing human progress may be mentioned Hannina, A.D. 205,
often spoken of by his successors as the earliest of Jewish physicians;
Samuel, equally distinguished as an astronomer, accoucheur, and oculist,
the inventor of a collyrium which bore his name; Rab, an anatomist, who
wrote a treatise on the structure of the body of man as ascertained by
dissections, thereby attaining such celebrity that the people, after his
death, used the earth of his grave as a medicine; Abba Oumna, whose
study of insanity plainly shows that he gave a material interpretation
to the national doctrine of possession by devils, and replaced that
strange delusion by the scientific explanation of corporeal derangement.
This honourable physician made it a rule never to take a fee from the
poor, and never to make any difference in his assiduous attention
between them and the rich. These men may be taken as a type of their
successors to the seventh century, when the Oriental schools were broken
up in consequence of the Arab military movements. In the Talmudic
literature there are all the indications of a transitional state, so far
as medicine is concerned; the supernatural seems to be passing into the
physical, the ecclesiastical is mixed up with the exact: thus a rabbi
may cure disease by the ecclesiastical operation of laying on of hands;
but of febrile disturbances, an exact, though erroneous explanation is
given, and paralysis of the hind legs of an animal is correctly referred
to the pressure of a tumour on the spinal cord. Some of its aphorisms
are not devoid of amusing significance: "Any disease, provided the
bowels remain open; any kind of pain, provided the heart remain
unaffected; any kind of uneasiness, provided the head be not attacked;
all manner of evils