distinctly more rational than it became in the Middle Ages. We cannot
conceive of a reputable doctor at Rome prescribing the nauseous
mediaeval absurdities. Practical surgery must have been surprisingly
advanced, and there is scarcely a modern surgeon who does not exclaim
in admiration of the instruments discovered at Pompeii and now
preserved in the Naples Museum (see FIG. 69). In physic it is, of
course, tolerably certain that many of the remedies or methods of
treatment were of the sound and simple kind discovered by the long
experience of mankind and often put in use by our grandmothers.
The defect contemporary medicine was that it was almost wholly
empirical. The ancient surgeon could doubtless perform ordinary
operations--amputations and excisions--with neatness, and the ancient
physician knew perfectly well what to do with the ordinary
complaints--the fevers and agues, the bilious attacks, the gout, or
the dropsy--but he was baffled by any new conditions. Moreover, if he
could diagnose and cure, he could seldom prevent, inasmuch as he had
little understanding of the causes of maladies. He had everything to
learn in regard to sanitation and the preventing of infection. A
plague would sometimes kill half the people in a town or district, and
the loss of 30,000 persons in the metropolis would probably appear to
most Romans as a visitation of the gods, nor is it certain that the
doctors would generally disagree with that view. Though there were
many quacks, it is not the case that the reputable medical men--most
of them Greek, some of them Romans, who borrowed a Greek name because
it "paid"--lacked the scientific spirit or such knowledge as the time
afforded. They went to the medical school at Alexandria or elsewhere,
and studied their treatises on physic and anatomy, but, at least in
the latter subject, they were sadly hampered. Dissection of human
bodies was forbidden by law as being a desecration of the dead, and
though it might sometimes be practised _sub rosa_, it was the general
custom to perform the dissections on other animals, particularly
monkeys, and to argue thence erroneously to mankind.

CHAPTER XXI

PHILOSOPHY--STOICS AND EPICUREANS

With such an unsatisfactory equipment of science, and with such a
vague and morally inoperative religion, it was no wonder that the
higher minds of the contemporary world turned to the study of
philosophy. Of such studies there had been many schools or sects,