rian school for the condyles
of the femur. Galen and other medical authors use it, and Luke, in
giving the details of the story of the lame man cured, in the third
chapter of the Acts, seventh verse, selects it because it exactly
expresses the meaning he wished to convey. In this story there are a
number of added medical details. These are all evidently arranged so as
to give the full medical significance to the miracle. For instance, the
man had been _lame from birth_, literally _from the womb of his mother_.
At this time he was forty years of age, an age at which the spontaneous
cure of such an ailment or, indeed, any cure of it, could scarcely be
expected, if, during the preceding time, there had been no improvement.

In the story of the cure of Saul's blindness Luke says in the Acts that
his blindness fell from him like scales. The figure is a typically
medical one. The word for fall that is used is, as was pointed out by
Hobart ("Medical Language of St. Luke," Dublin, 1882), exactly the term
that is used for the falling of scales from the body. The term for
scales is the specific designation of the particles that fall from the
body during certain skin diseases or after certain of the infectious
fevers, as in scarlet fever. Hippocrates and Galen have used it in many
places. It is distinctively a medical word. In the story of the vision
of St. Peter, told also in the Acts, the word _ecstasis_, from which we
derive our word ecstasy, is used. This is the only word St. Luke uses
for vision and he alone uses it. This term is of constant employment in
a technical sense in the medical writers of St. Luke's time and before
it. When the other evangelists talk of lame people they use the popular
term. This might mean anything or nothing for a physician. Luke uses one
of the terms that is employed by physicians when they wish to indicate
that for some definite reason there is inability to walk.

In the story of the Good Samaritan there are some interesting details
that indicate medical interest on the part of the writer. It is Luke's
characteristic story and a typical medical instance. He employs certain
words in it that are used only by medical writers. The use of oil and
wine in the treatment of the wounds of the stranger traveller was at one
time said to indicate that it could not have been a physician who wrote
the story, since the ancients used oil for external applications in such
cases but not wine. More careful search