which most physicians find it very difficult to attain. Asclepiades condemned strongly the employment of magical remedies, a practice which was still much in use at that time in Rome, although it was already less common than it had previously been. Cato's collection of household remedies contains a short list of some of these appeals to man's superstition.[1] In addition to the remedial measures mentioned above, Asclepiades placed his chief dependence on the following: abstinence from meat; the employment of wine under certain well-defined circumstances; massage and frictions; baths of different kinds (it is said that he devised a great variety); walking; driving and being carried about in the open air in a litter or in a boat on a quiet river or in the protected harbor. One of his remedies in the case of sleeplessness consisted in having the patient placed in a suspended couch which could easily be rocked from side to side. As all these measures were agreeable and could at the same time easily be employed by almost everybody, they met with general favor, and in consequence Asclepiades was looked upon by the Romans as "a person sent from heaven." As a rule, he recommended the drinking of simple water, but in certain cases (to be mentioned farther on) he did not hesitate to advise the taking of wine in moderation. He advocated tracheotomy, in cases of inflammation of the throat, in preference to the then prevailing practice—both very painful and quite difficult to carry out—of introducing a tube of some kind as a means of opening a passage for the entrance of air into the lungs.
Le Clerc quotes Galen as authority for the statement that Asclepiades, who never hesitated for an instant to criticise the different therapeutic procedures of his predecessors,
- ↑ It would not be easy to fix, even approximately, the date when remedies of this character ceased to find acceptance in the popular mind of Europeans, but there can be no doubt that they were employed rather frequently even as late as during the eighteenth century;—indeed, measures that strongly smack of superstition are now and then looked upon with favor by the well-educated members of our modern society. For many centuries, however, they have been abandoned by all physicians excepting those who are unworthy to bear that honored title.
