he replies that it has not, then (you may infer that the pain is due to gout and) you should forthwith put him on a suitable diet, order a clyster and bleed him at a spot not far (from the seat of the pain). . . . The withdrawal of nourishment is ordered for the purpose of arresting any further formation of new blood and thus preventing the joints from growing more sluggish in their movements. The clyster is ordered because we believe that it is beneficial (in this condition) to evacuate the bowels. The bleeding will be found useful, but to a less degree in the lower than in the upper limbs. . . . One must be careful not to assume that the patient is cured when he has been entirely relieved of his pain, because with the lapse of time fresh attacks are liable to occur; this disease, like certain other affections, possesses a periodic character. . . . Therefore it is well, immediately after the bloodletting, to employ friction, to get rid of the excess of moisture in the body by some laborious form of exercise, to take such articles of food as are easily digested,—in brief, to aim chiefly at reducing as much as possible the moisture of the body.
One cannot but feel a keen regret that so few of the
writings of this thoroughly practical and highly educated
physician should have come down to our time. So far as
I am able to learn, Rufus wrote no fewer than 102
treatises, all of which, with the exception of the seven
about to be mentioned (together with a number of fragments
preserved by different writers of antiquity) have
either disappeared or been destroyed. The titles of the
treatises which have been preserved are as follows:
(1) Diseases of the Kidneys and Bladder; (2) On Satyriasis
and Gonorrhoea; (3) Purgatives; (4) The Names of the
Different Parts of the Human Body; (5) On the Questioning
of Patients; (6) On the Pulse; (7) On Gout.
A General Survey of the Subject of Sects in Medicine.—During the sixth century B. C.,—that is, about two hundred years before the formation of the more distinctly medical sects of which mention was made in Chapter IX.,—Pythagoras of Samos and his disciples put forward certain beliefs or doctrines with regard to the mode of action of some of the functions or vital processes of the human body, and all those who accepted these teachings as affording a true and satisfactory explanation of the
