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MEDICI governed Florence for some time under the orders of Leo X. He made himself by force of arms duke of Urbino in 1516, and in 1518 married Madeleine de la Tour, of the royal house of France. He died April 28, 1519, a few days after the birth of his famous daugh- ter Catharine de' Medici. Prior to his mar- riage the duke of Urbino had an illegitimate son named ALESSANDRO, whose mother was an African slave. The paternity of Alessandro has also been attributed to Pope Clement VII., who was himself an illegitimate son of Giulia- no, the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent. It is certain that Alessandro was in high favor with the pontiff, who, on the death of Loren- zo II. without legitimate male heir, and the consequent failure of the descendants of Cosmo the Elder, brought him forward in order to prevent the power of the family from passing into the hands of a collateral branch descend- ed from a brother of Cosmo. He accordingly availed himself of the dissensions of the Flor- entines, and in 1532, with the assistance of the emperor and the king of France, he compelled the republic to receive Alessandro as its ruler, with the title of duke. He proved, however, to be a licentious tyrant, and was assassinated on Jan. 6, 1537, by Lorenzino, a member of the collateral branch of the family. The citizens assembled on this event, and invested COSMO DE' MEDICI, surnamed the Great, the cousin of Lorenzino, with the sovereignty under the ti- tle of chief of the republic, which he after- ward exchanged for that of grand duke. He became the progenitor of a line of grand dukes, six in number, who ruled Tuscany till 1737, when the main line of the Medici family be- came extinct. (See TUSCANY.) MEDICI) Catharine de'. See CATHARINE DE' MEDICI. MEDICI, Maria de See MARIA DE' MEDICI. MEDICINE, the science and art of curing dis- ease. Some rude appliances to wounds and in- juries, some equally rude observances in cases of internal disease, are common among the most barbarous people. The idea that disease is caused by the anger of superior and invisible beings placed its treatment in the hands of the priests, and the same idea caused that treat- ment to consist mainly of superstitious rites. In what beyond this consisted the medicine of the Egyptians and the Hindoos is a matter of conjecture only. In Greece as elsewhere the early history of medicine is involved in dark- ness, and it is idle to guess how much truth is contained in the fables concerning Chiron and his pupil ^Esculapius, or the sons of the latter, the Homeric heroes Machaon and Podalirius. We know, however, that the temples of jEs- culapius were from an early period the resort of the sick, who submitted themselves to the regulations of the Asclepiadse, the priests of the temples. It was common among those who were cured to deposit in the temple a votive tablet, on which was inscribed some account of the case and of the remedies by which it MEDICINE 345 was relieved ; but if the tablets which have come down to us are fair samples, but little information could have been communicated in this way. Much more must have been due to the education in the temple, to personal observation, and to the restless and inquiring spirit which animated the early Greeks. But the temples of ^Esculapius are not the only source to which the origin of scientific medi- cine is to be traced ; in the schools of philo- sophy some attention was always paid to the healing art as a branch of general education. When the school of Pythagoras was broken up, and his disciples were dispersed, some of them attended to the practice of medicine ; and un- like the AsclepiadaD, who confined their con- sultations to the temples, the Pythagoreans visited the sick at their residences. Of the ex- tent of their knowledge or the value of their treatment we have no means of forming a judgment. Even at this period it seems that there was still another class, the charlatans, who, without any pretension to education, offered their nostrums for sale in the market place. Besides the temples of ^Esculapius and the schools of philosophy, the gymnasia un- doubtedly contributed to form the earlier phy- sicians. The gymnasiarchs directed the regi- men of those who resorted to the gymnasia ; they acquired practical skill in the treatment of the injuries to which their pupils were lia- ble; they set fractures, reduced dislocations, directed frictions, dressings, &c. In these va- rious ways medicine had already made sensible progress when Hippocrates (born in Cos about 460 B. 0.) collected the scattered knowledge of his time, and added to it by his own genius and observation. Of the numerous works as- cribed to Hippocrates, enough are decided to be genuine by the unanimous consent of the learned to justify the veneration in which he has always been held as the father of rational medicine. Of anatomy the notions of Hippo- crates were crude and limited, and must have been derived solely from the inspection of ani- mals, since the religious prejudices of the an- cients prevented the dissection of the human body, until a period long posterior to the one of which we speak. His physiology is on a level with his anatomy. The glands are spongy bodies destined to absorb moisture from the neighboring parts, and the brain, the largest of the glands, draws the vapors from the whole interior of the body. The use of the muscles is to cover the bones, &c. (Eenouard, Eistoire de la medecine.) The body itself is composed of the four elements differently combined in different individuals, and derived from them we have the four humors of the body, blood, phlegm, bile, and black bile, from which again are derived the four temperaments. Disease consists in a disordered condition of the flu- ids ; these are subject to coction, which when complete terminates in a critical evacuation, the localization of the disease, and the forma- tion of a critical abscess, the occurrence of