of human activity taken together. We may, therefore, safely assume that this golden age, which lasted only about two hundred years, represents simply the culmination of an even longer period of slow but steady development, a period of creditable though perhaps less brilliant achievements.
Of the names mentioned above there are several that belong to men who were in various ways connected with the early history of medicine. Pythagoras, for example, is said to have been one of the first among the Greek philosophers to exert a strong and double impression upon the medical teaching of that period. He was born in the Island of Samos, near the coast of Asia Minor, about the year 575 B. C. After spending several years in Egypt for purposes of study, and probably visiting Babylon, at that time a great centre of learning and of artistic cultivation, he established at Crotona, in the south of Italy, a school[1] where natural philosophy, mathematics, acoustics, etc., were taught. He also devoted some attention to anatomy, to embryology, to physiology and to therapeutics. According to his views of what constituted hygienic living a man should accustom himself to a diet of the simplest character, without meat. Pythagoras was a believer in the Chaldean doctrine that the uneven numbers possess a more important significance than the even, and that the number seven in particular has a special relationship to the phenomena of certain diseases; the crisis frequently falling on the seventh, fourteenth, or twenty-first day. Galen, it is said, expressed surprise that a man as sensible and learned as Pythagoras should have paid any attention to such trifles. Not a few of the disciples of Pythagoras were physicians,
- ↑ The word "school," when employed in the strictly modern sense of that term, means an establishment regularly organized for the purpose of giving instruction. Here, however, it is intended to signify simply that certain places, like Cos, Crotona, Cnidus, etc., had become the rendezvous of men who desired to cultivate—some as teachers, others as disciples or pupils—certain branches of knowledge, or certain doctrines. At a later period (third century B. C.) there was established at Alexandria, Egypt, a well-organized school of medicine closely resembling those of modern times.
