Of midwifery we have a distinct notice (Exod. i, 15), and of women as its practitioners, which fact may also be verified from the sculptures (Kawlinson's note on Herod, ii. 84\ The sex of the practitioners is clear from tlie Hob. grammatical forms. The names of two, Shiphrah and Puah, are recorded. The treatment of new-born Hebrew infants is mentioned (Ezek.xvi.4) as consisting in wasliing. sailing, and swaddling— this last was not used in Egypt (Wilkinson). The j)hysician8 had salaries from the public treasury, and treated al- ways acconiing to established precedents, or deviated from these at their peril, in case of a fatal termination; if, however, the patient dietl inider accredited treatment, no blame was attached. They treated gratis patients wlien travelling or on military service. Most diseases were by them ascribed to indigestion and excessive eating (Diod. Sicul. i, 82\ and when their science failed them magic was called in. On recovery it was also
MEDICINE
29
MEDICINE
Ancieut Egyptian Kxvotos, for Cures,
1. Ivory hand, in Mr. Salt's collection.
2. Stone tablet, dedicated to Aniun-re, for the recovery of a conipla
3. An ear, of terra cotta, from Thebes, in Sir Gardiner Wilkinson'
customary to suspend in a temple an exvoto, which was commonly a model of the part affected ; and such offer- ings doubtless, as in the Coan Temple of ^sculapius, became valuable aids to the pathological student. The Egyptians who lived in the corn-growing region are said by Herodotus (ii, 77) to have been specially atten- tive to health. The practice of circumcision is trace- able on monuments certainly anterior to the age of Jo- seph. Its antiquity is involved in obscurity, especially as all we know of the Egyptians makes it unlikely that they would have borrowed such a practice, so late as the period of Abraham, from any mere sojourner among them. Its beneficial effects in the temperature of Egypt and Syria have often been noticed, especially as a pre- servative of cleanliness, etc. The scrupulous attention paid to the dead was favorable to the health of the liv- ing. Such powerful drugs as asphaltum, natron, resin, pure bitumen, and various aromatic gums, suppressed or counteracted all noxious effluvia from the corpse ; even the saw-dust of the floor, on which the body had been cleansed, was collected in small linen bags, which, to the number of twenty or thirty, were deposited in vases near the tomb (Wilkinson, v, 4G8, 469). For the extent to which these practices were imitated among the Jews, see E.'MBALJiiNG. At any rate, the uncleanness imputed to contact with a corpse was a powerful preservative against the inoculation of the living frame with morbid humors. But, to pursue to later times this merely gen- eral question, it appears (Pliny, N. H. xix, 5) that the Ptolemies themselves practiced dissection, and that, at a period when Jewish intercourse with Egypt was com- plete and reciprocal, there existed in Alexandria a great zeal for anatomical study. The only intiuence of im- portance which would tend to check the Jews from sharing this was the ceremonial law, the special rever- ence of Jewish feeling towards human remains, and the abhorrence of "uncleanness." Yet those Jews — and there were, at all times since the Captivity, not a few, perhaps— who tended to foreign laxitj', and affected Greek philosophy and culture, would assuredly, as we shall have further occasion to notice that they in fact did, enlarge their anatomical knowledge from sources which repelled their stricter brethren, and the result would be apparent in the general elevated standard of that profession, even as practiced in Jerusalem. The diffusion of Christianity in the 3d and 4th centuries ex- ercised a similar but more universal restraint on the dissecting-room, until anatomy as a pursuit became ex- tinct, and, the notion of profaneness quelling everywhere such researches, surgical science became stagnant to a degree to which it had never previously sunk within the memory of human records.
3. Grecian. — In comparing the growth of medicine in the rest of the ancient world, the high rank of its prac- titioners— princes and heroes — settles at once the ques-
tion as to the esteem in which it was held in the Homeric and pre- Homeric period. To descend to the historical, the story of Democedes at the court of Darius illustrates the practice of Greek surgery be- fore the period of Hippocrates- anticipating, in its gentler waiting upon nature, as compared (Herod, iii, 130) with that of the Persians and Egyptians, the methods and maxims of that father of physic, who wrote against the theories and . speculations of the so-called Phil- osophical school, and was a true empiricist before that sect was for- mularized. The Dogmatic school was founded after his time by his disciples, who departed from his eminently practical and inductive method. It recognized hidden causes of health and sickness aris- ing from certain supposed principles or elements, out of which bodies were composed, and by virtue of which all their parts and members were attempered together and became sympathetic. Hippocrates has some curious re- marks on the sympathy of men with climate, seasons, etc. He himself rejected supernatural accounts of disease, and especially demoniacal possession. He refers, but with no mystical sense, to numbers as furnishing a rule for cases. It is remarkable that he extols the discern- ment of Orientals above Westerns, and of Asiatics above Europeans, in medical diagnosis. The Empirical school, which arose in the 3d century B.C., under the guidance of Acron of Agrigentum, Serapion of Alexandria, and Phi- linus of Cos, waited for the symptoms of every case, dis- regarding the rules of practice based on dogmatic princi- ples. Among its votaries was a Zachalias (perhaps Zach- arias, and possibly a Jew) of Babylon, who (Pliny, N. H, xxxvii, 10 ; comp. xxxvi, 10) dedicated a book on med- icine to Mithridates the Great ; its views were also sup- ported by Herodotus of Tarsus, a place which, next to Alexandria, became distinguished for its schools of phi- losophy and medicine ; as also by a Jew named Theodas, or Theudas, of Laodicea (see Wunderbar, Bibiisch-Tal- mudische Medicin, i, 25), but a student of Alexandria, and the last, or nearly so, of the empiricists whom its schools produced. The remarks of Theudas on the right method of observing, and the value of experience, and his book on medicine, now lost, in -which he arranged his subject under the heads of iiidicato7-ia, curatoria, and salubris, earned him high reputation as a champion of empiricism against the reproaches of the dogmatists, though they were subsequently impugned by Galen and Theodosiiis of Tripoli. His period was that from Titus to Hadrian. "The empiricists held that observation and the application of known remedies in one case to others presumed to be similar constitute the whole art of cultivating medicine. Though their views were nar- row, and their information scanty when compared with some of the chiefs of the other sects, and although they rejected as nseless and unattainable all knowledge of the causes and recondite nature of diseases, it is unde- niable that, besides personal experience, they* freely availed themselves of historical detail, and of a strict analogy founded upon observation and the resemblance of phenomena" (Dr. Adams, Paid. jEyin. ed. Svdenham Soc).