Outlines Toridreams Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine Paperback

EARLY ROMAN MEDICINE.Origin ofHealing-Temples-Lectisternium-Temple ofAEsculapius-Archagathus-DomesticMedicine-Greek Doctors-CloacaMaxima-Aqueducts-Stateof the early Empire.The origin of the healing art in Ancient Rome is shrouded in uncertainty.The earliest practice of medicine was undoubtedly theurgic, and commonto all primitive peoples. The offices of priest and of medicine-man werecombined in one person, and magic was invoked to take the place of knowl-edge. There is much scope for the exercise of the imagination in attemptingto follow the course of early man in his efforts to bring plants into medici-nal use. That some of the indigenous plants had therapeutic properties wasoften an accidental discovery, leading in the next place to experiment andobservation. Cornelius Agrippa, in his book on occult philosophy, statesthat mankind has learned the use of many remedies from animals. It haseven been suggested that the use of the enema was discovered by observinga long-beaked bird drawing up water into its beak, and injecting the waterinto the bowel. The practice of healing, crude and imperfect, progressed3 SIR JAMES ELLIOTTslowly in ancient times and was conducted in much the same way in Rome,and among the Egyptians, the Jews, the Chaldeans, Hindus and Parsees, andthe Chinese and Tartars.The Etruscans had considerable proficiency in philosophy and medicine,and to this people, as well as to the Sabines, the Ancient Romans were in-debted for knowledge. Numa Pompilius, of Sabine origin, who was Kingof Rome 715 B.C., studied physical science, and, as Livy relates, was struckby lightning and killed as the result of his experiments, and it has thereforebeen inferred that these experiments related to the investigation of electric-ity. It is surprising to find in the Twelve Tables of Numa references to dentaloperations. In early times, it is certain that the Romans were more prone tolearn the superstitions of other peoples than to acquire much useful knowl-edge. They were cosmopolitan in medical art as in religion. They had ac-quaintance with the domestic medicine known to all savages, a little rudesurgery, and prescriptions from the Sibylline books, and had much recourseto magic. It was to Greece that the Romans first owed their knowledge ofhealing, and of art and science generally, but at no time did the Romansequal the Greeks in mental culture.Pliny states that "the Roman people for more than six hundred years werenot, indeed, without medicine, but they were without physicians."