and laid
the foundation for serious study there. For three centuries there is
some good worker, at or in connection with Alexandria, whose name is
preserved for us in the history of medicine. Other Greek schools of
medicine in the East, as, for instance, that of Pergamos, also did
excellent work. Galen is the great representative of this school, and he
came in the century after St. Luke. A physician educated in Greek
medicine at that time, then, would be in an excellent position to judge
critically of the miracles of healing of the Christ, and it would seem
to have been providential that Luke was called for this purpose.

The evidence for his membership of our profession will doubtless be
interesting to all physicians. Some of the distinctive passages in which
Luke's familiarity with medical terms to such an extent that to express
his meaning he found himself compelled to use them, will appeal at once
to these, for whom such terms are part of everyday speech. The use of
the word _hydropikos_, which is not to be met with anywhere else in the
New Testament, nor in the non-medical Greek literature of that time,
though the word is of frequent occurrence as a designation for a person
suffering from dropsy (and always, as in Luke, the adjective for the
substantive), in Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen is a typical
example.

Where such vague terms as paralyzed occur Luke does not use the familiar
word, but the medical term that meant stricken with paralysis,
indicating not any inability to use the limbs, but such a one as was due
to a stroke of apoplexy. We who, as physicians, have heard of so many
cures of paralysis from our friends, the Eddyites, are prone to ask, as
the first question, what sort of a paralysis it was. Luke made inquiries
from men who were eye-witnesses, and then has described the scene with
such details as convinced him as a physician of the reality of the
miracle, and his description was meant to carry conviction to the minds
of others.

Occasionally St. Luke uses words which only a physician would be likely
to know at all. That is to say, even a man reasonably familiar with
medical terminology and medical literature would not be likely to know
them unless he had been technically trained. One of these is the word
_sphudron_, a word which is only medical, and is not to be found even in
such large Greek lexicons of ordinary words as that of Passow. Sphudron
is the anatomical term of the Graeco-Alexand