f medical diagnosis and scientific knowledge;
5, if the language, even where questions of medicine or of
healing are not touched upon, is colored by medical
phraseology; and, 6, if in those passages where the author
speaks as an eye-witness medical traits are especially and
prominently apparent. These three kinds of tokens are also
found in the historical work of our author. It is accordingly
proved that it proceeds from the pen of a physician.

The importance of the concession that Luke was a physician should be
properly appreciated. His whole gospel is written from that standpoint.
For him the Saviour was the healer, the good physician who went about
curing the ills of the body, while ministering to people's souls. He has
more accounts of miracles of healing than any of the other Evangelists.
He has taken certain of the stories of the other Evangelists who were
eye-witnesses, and when they were told in naive and popular language
that obscured the real condition that was present, he has retold the
story from the physician's standpoint, and thus the miracle becomes
clearer than ever. In one case, where Mark has a slur on physicians,
Luke eliminates it. In a number of cases the correction of Mark's
popular language in the description of ailments is made in terms that
could not have been used except by one thoroughly versed in the Greek
medical terminology of the times. As a matter of fact, there seems to be
no doubt now that Luke had been, before he became an Evangelist, a
practising physician in Malta of considerable experience. His testimony,
then, to the miracles is particularly valuable as almost a medical
eye-witness.

In medical science, St. Luke's time was by no means barren of knowledge.
The Alexandrian school of medicine had done some fine work in its time.
It was the first university medical school in the world's history, and
there dissection was first practised regularly and publicly for the sake
of anatomy, and even the vivisection of criminals who were supplied by
the Ptolemei for human physiology, was a part of the school curriculum.
A number of important discoveries in brain anatomy are attributed to
Herophilus, after whom the torcular herophili within the skull is named,
and who invented the term calamus scriptorius for certain appearances
in the fourth ventricle. His colleague, Erasistratus, the co-founder of
this school at Alexandria, did work in pathological anatomy,