of the better citizens. At a later date Julius Caesar, who was, at that time, Consul (about 90 B. C.), extended the right of citizenship to all foreign physicians who were practicing in Rome, and thus was removed one of the greatest obstacles which prevented the better class of Greek medical men from settling in that city.
More than a hundred years before the time of which I am speaking (i.e., about 218 B. C.), a Greek physician named Archagathus had the courage to take up his abode in Rome. He was the son of Lysanias, a native of Peloponnesus. At first he appeared to gain the favor of the community in which he practiced, for they bought and placed at his disposal a shop, or office, in the cross-way of Acilius, and gave him the name of vulnerarius—healer of wounds. Later, however, they disliked his rather too free use of the knife and the actual cautery, and thereafter he was spoken of as the carnifex, or executioner. Medicine was thus brought into disrepute and we hear nothing further about physicians in Rome for more than a century—that is, until about 90 B. C., when Asclepiades,[1] a native of the city of Prusa, Bithynia (northwest part of Asia Minor), made his appearance in that city. At first he taught rhetoric, but, finding this occupation unprofitable, he began the practice of medicine. Pliny says that he acquired a knowledge of this art through the studies which he carried on after his arrival in the city of Rome, but Neuburger makes the statement that he began the study of rhetoric, philosophy and medicine in his youth and then spent some time in perfecting his knowledge at Parion, a city of Mysia on the Hellespont, at Athens, and probably also at Alexandria.
As a practitioner Asclepiades appears to have met with unusual success. He was well educated and possessed of agreeable manners, and was the friend as well as the physician of Cicero, one of the most polished men of whom history furnishes us any knowledge. He was also on terms of intimacy with Atticus and other eminent citizens of
- ↑ Asclepiades was not a descendant of Aesculapius, as one would naturally infer from the name which he bore.
