of a prognosis. So I remarked to the patient: "You will probably soon experience, if you have not already done so, a sensation of something pulling upon the right clavicle." He admitted that he had already noticed this symptom. "Then I will give just one more evidence of this power of divination which you believe that I possess. You, yourself, before I arrived on the scene, had made up your mind that your ailment was an attack of pleurisy, etc."
Glaucon's confidence in me and in the medical art, after this episode, was unbounded.
Thirty or forty years elapsed after Galen's death before
the Profession began to realize how great an authority he
had become in all matters relating to medicine; not perhaps
among the majority of physicians, but among the better
educated and those more given to reasoning about the
various problems in physiology and pathology. Then came
the invasion of Rome by the Barbarians, and with it the
scattering of nearly all those who were at the time practicing
medicine in that great city. This was the beginning
of the long period known as the Middle Ages, a period
during which, so far as Italy and Gaul were concerned, the
science of medicine made no advance whatever. The
physicians living in a precarious manner in the towns, and
the monks who practiced medicine in the country districts,
took very little interest, as may readily be imagined, in the
achievements of Galen. Through all those years they
clung to the doctrines of the Methodists, as revealed to
them in the work of Caelius Aurelianus, the favorite
medical treatise of that period. It was only during the
latter part of the Middle Ages that Galen's teachings
began once more to be appreciated at their true value;
and, as time went on, they gained a stronger and stronger
hold on the minds of medical men, until finally they held
undisputed sway. Friedlaender, speaking of medicine in
those dark times, uses these words: "Galen's colossal
personality loomed up throughout that long night as a
brilliant guiding star to light the intricate pathways of
medicine."
