Longimanus till the unsuccessful invasion by Artaxerxes
Mnemon.

No men of learning in Alexandria were more famous than the physicians.
Erasistratus of Cos had the credit of having once cured Antiochus,
afterwards King of Syria. He was the grandson of Aristotle, and may
be called the father of the science of anatomy: his writings are often
quoted by Dioscorides. Antiochus in his youth had fallen deeply in love
with his young stepmother, and was pining away in silence and despair.
Erasistratus found out the cause of his illness, which was straightway
cured by Seleucus giving up his wife to his own son. This act strongly
points out the changed opinions of the world as to the matrimonial
relation; for it was then thought the father's best title to the name
of Nicator; he had before conquered his enemies, but he then conquered
himself.

Erasistratus was the first who thought that a knowledge of anatomy
should be made a part of the healing art. Before his time surgery and
medicine had been deemed one and the same; they had both been studied by
the slow and uncertain steps of experience, unguided by theory. Many a
man who had been ill, whether through disease or wound, and had regained
his health, thought it his duty to Esculapius and to his neighbours to
write up in the temple of the god the nature of his ailings, and the
simples to which he fancied that he owed his cure. By copying these
loose but well-meant inscriptions of medical cases, Hippocrates had,
a century earlier, laid the foundations of the science; but nothing
further was added to it till Erasistratus, setting at nought the
prejudices in which he was born, began dissecting the human body in the
schools of Alexandria. There the mixing together of Greeks and Egyptians
had weakened those religious feelings of respect for the dead which are
usually shocked by anatomy; and this study flourished from the low
tone of the morality as much as from the encouragement which good sense
should grant to every search for knowledge.

Herophilus lived about the same time with Erasistratus, and was, like
him, famous for his knowledge of the anatomy of man. But so hateful was
this study in the eyes of many, that these anatomists were charged by
writers who ought to have known better, with the cruelty of cutting
men open when alive. They had few followers in the hated use of the
dissecting-knife. It was from their writings that Galen borrowed the
anatomical parts of his work; an