Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/115

to those famous sculptors, Polyclytus and Phidias. His writings and those of the members of his family who were associated with him in the work of promoting a knowledge of medicine were most carefully preserved by his successors. When the Ptolemies began to establish libraries at Alexandria, Egypt (285 B. C.), and manifested a decided readiness to purchase the works of the most celebrated authors, copies of the Hippocratic writings were among those which found their way to that city. This eagerness on the part of the Kings of Egypt to purchase books or manuscripts stimulated unscrupulous persons to attribute to celebrated authors not a few of these works which they offered for sale. The librarians, whose duty it was to guard against such frauds, were not sufficiently well informed to prevent them; and thus there were accepted, as genuine productions, a few books which could not possibly have been written by those to whom they were attributed. The collection of Hippocratic writings did not escape this fate, and the evil was also further aggravated by the fact that copyists and incompetent editors made all sorts of emendations and additions on their own responsibility. Thus, it is not surprising that a collection which originally contained only the writings of Hippocrates and his immediate family, should in course of time have become expanded, not only by such alterations as have just been described, but also by the addition of entire works that had been written by others. At the beginning of the third century B. C., the Ptolemies appointed a committee of learned men in Alexandria to examine carefully the treatises reputed to be the work of Hippocrates and to make a collection of those which appeared to them to be genuine. They performed this task to the best of their ability, but the result showed that they lacked the necessary critical powers; and consequently during the past 2000 years repeated attempts have been made to do what they failed to accomplish, but these efforts have only succeeded in part. The French edition prepared by Émile Littré, the distinguished member of the French Academy of Medicine, and published in the years 1839-1861, was, until quite