teries, and appeals to the name
of the Saviour and the martyrs. He was evidently a man of wide reading,
for he quotes from practically every important medical writer before his
time. Indeed, he is most valuable for the history of medicine, because
he gives us some idea of the mode of treatment of various subjects by
predecessors whose fame we know, but none of whose works have come to
us. His official career and the patronage of the Emperor, the breadth
of his scholarship, and the thoroughly practical character of his
teaching, show how medical science and medical art were being developed
and encouraged at this time.

Aetius' work that is preserved for us is known in medical literature as
his sixteen books on medical practice. In most of the manuscript it is
divided into four Tetrabibloi, or four book parts, each of which
consists of four sections called Logoi in Greek, Sermones in Latin. This
work embraces all the departments of medicine, and has a considerable
portion devoted to surgery, but most of the important operations and the
chapters on fractures and dislocations are lacking. Aetius himself
announces that he had prepared a special work on surgery, but this is
lost. Doubtless the important chapters that we have noted as lacking in
his work would be found in this. He is much richer in pathology than
most of the older writers, at least of the Christian era; for instance,
Gurlt says that he treats this feature of the subject much more
extensively even than Paulus AEginetus, but most of his work is devoted
to therapeutics.

At times those who read these old books from certain modern standpoints
are surprised to find such noteworthy differences between writers on
medicine, who are separated sometimes only by a generation, and
sometimes by not more than a century, in what regards the comparative
amount of space given to pathology, etiology, and therapeutics. Just
exactly the same differences exist in our own day, however. We all know
that for those who want pathology and etiology the work of one of our
great teachers is to be consulted, while for therapeutics it is better
to go to someone else. When we find such differences among the men of
the olden time we are not so apt to look at them with sympathetic
discrimination, as we do with regard to our contemporaries. We may even
set them down to ignorance rather than specialization of interest. These
differences depend on the attitude of mind of the physician, and are