8. In the New Testaimnt.— Luke, " the beloved phy- sician," who practiced at Antioch while the body was his care, could hardly have failed to be conversant with all the leading opinions current down to his own time. Situated between the great schools of Alexandria and Cilicia, within easy sea-transit of both, as well as of the Western homes of science, Antioch enjoyed a more cen- tral position than any great city of the ancient world, and in it accordingly all the streams of contemporary medical learning may have probably found a point of confluence. The medicine of the New Test, is not sole- ly, nor even chiefly, .Jewish medicine; and even if it were, it is clear that the more mankind became mixed by intercourse, the more medical opinion and practice must have ceased to be exclusive. The great number of Jews resident in Kome and Greece about the Chris- tian a^ra, and the successive decrees by which their ban- ishment from the former was proclaimed, must have imported, even into Palestine, whatever from the West was best worth knowing; and we may be as sure that its medicine and surgery expanded under these influ- ences as that, in the writings of the Talmudists, such obligations would be unacknowk'dgcd. Hut. beyond this, the growth of large mircanlilc ((iminuniiics. mkIi as existed in Home, Alexandria, AnliiKli, and l'',|ihcsiis, of itself involves a peculiar sanitary condition from the mass of human elements gathered to a focus under new or abnormal circumstances. Nor are the words in which an elo(|uent modern writer describes the course of this action less applicable to the case of an ancient than to that of a modern metropolis. " Diseases once indigenous to a section of humanity, are slowly but surely crcci)ing up to commercial centres, whence they will be rapidly propagated. One form of Asiatic leprosy is approaching . the Levant from Arabia. The history of every disease which is communicated from man to man establishes this melancholy truth, tltat ultimately such maladies overleap all oljsiai-les of climate, and demonstrate a sol- idarity in evil as well as in good among the brotherhood of nations'' (Dr. Ferguson, /Vp/'. y^'.wf/// fo (iooch on Dis- eases o/' 11 '"»«", New Sydenham Society, London, 1859, p. xlvi). In proiHirlion as this "melancholy truth" is perceived would an intercommunication of medical sci- ence prevail also.
4. In Coittempornri/ Ikdlhtn Writers. — The medicine and surgery referred to in the New Test., then, was ]irob- ably not inferior to that commonly in demand among educated Asiatic Greeks, and must have been, as regards its basis, Greek medicine, and nut Jewish. Hence a
standard Gentile medical writer, if any is to be found of that period, would best represent the profession to wliich the evangelist belonged. Without absolute certainty as to date, we seem to have such a writer in Aretieus, commonly called ''the Cappadocian," who wrote cer- tainly after Nero's reign began, and probably flourished shortly before and after the decade in which Paul reached Kome and Jerusalem fell. If he were of Luke's age, it is striking that he should also be perhaps the only ancient medical authority in favor of drumoniacal pos- session as a possible account of epilepsy. If his coun- try be rightly indicated by his surname, we know that it gave him the means of intercourse with both the Jews and the Christians of the apostolic period (Acts ii, 9; 1 Pet. i, 1). It is \eTy likely that Tarsus, the nearest place of academic repute to that region, was the scene of, at any rate, the earlier studies of Aretaeus, nor would any chronological difficulty prevent his hav- ing been a pupil in medicine there when Paul and also, perhaps, Barnabas were, as is probable, pursuing their early studies in other subjects at the same spot. Are- tiuus, then, assuming the date above indicated, may be taken as expounding the medical practice of the Asiatic Greeks in the latter lialf of the first centurj-. There is, however, much of strongly-marked individuality in his work, more especially in the minute verbal portraiture of disease. That of pulmonary consumption in partic- ular, is traced with the careful description of an eye-wit- ness, and represents with a curious exactness the curved nails, shrunken fingers, slender, sharpened nostrils, hol- low, glazy eye, cadaverous look and hue, the waste of muscle and startling prominence of bones, the scapida standing off like the wing of a bird; as also the habit of body marking predispfjsition to the malady, the thin, veneer-like frames, the limbs like pinions, the prominent throat and shallow chest, with a remark that moist and j cold climates are the haunts of it (Aret. irepi (ftiiffiwc). His work exhibits strong traits here and there of the Pneumatic school, as in his statement regarding leth- 1 argy, that it is frigidity implanted by nature ; concern- ing elephantiasis even more emphatically, that it is a i refrigeration of the innate heat, '• or, rather, a congela- ] tion— as it were one great winter of the system." The same views betray themselves in his statement regard- ing the blood, that it is the warming principle of all the i parts; that diabetes is a sort of dropsy, both exhibiting I the watery principle ; and that the effect of white hel- lebore is as that of fire: "so that whatever fire does by burning, hellebore effects still more by penetrating in- wardly." The last remark shows that he gave some scope to his imagination, which indeed we might illus- 1 trate from some of his pathological descriptions; e. g. that of elephantiasis, where the resemblance of the beast j to the afliictod human being is wrought to a fanciful parallel. Allowing for such overstrained touches here and there, we may say that he generally avoids extrav- agant crotchets, and rests chiefly on wide observation, and on the common-sense which sobers theory and ra- tionalizes facts. He hardly ever quotes an authority; and though much of what he states was taught before, it is dealt with as the common property of science, or as , become suiJKri.f through being proved by his own ex-