remedies. For example, Aëtius gives formulae containing the names of the Saviour and the Holy Martyrs for exorcising certain maladies, and he recommends the employment of amulets. The subject of baths is treated by him quite thoroughly, and he lays stress upon the importance of physical exercise as a means of maintaining one's health. Freind, the author of an English history of medicine which was very popular in its day,[1] quotes the following remedy for gout from the treatise of Aëtius:—
In September to drink milk;
in October to eat garlick;
in November to abstain from bathing;
in December not to eat cabbage;
in January to take a glass of pure wine in the morning;
in February to eat no beet;
in March to mix sweet things both in eatables and drinkables;
in April not to eat horseradish;
nor in May the fish called Polypus;
in June to drink cold water;—and so on through the remainder of the year.
At the end of the French version of "Les Oeuvres de Rufus d'Éphèse" (translated from the Greek by Daremberg and Ruelle) will be found fragments of some of the books of Aëtius; in 1899 J. Hirschberg translated into German Book VII. (eye diseases) of the same author; and, two years later (1901) Max Wegscheider published a German version of Book XVI. (obstetrics and gynaecology). No other translations of the writings of Aëtius into either French, German or English are—so far as I am able to learn—available.
Alexander of Tralles.—Alexander of Tralles, a city of Lydia, in Asia Minor, was born about 525 A. D. His father Stephanus was highly esteemed as a practicing physician, and his four brothers, all of them older than himself, were men of distinction in their several callings; Anthemius, the oldest, being one of the greatest mathematicians and mechanicians of his day and the man to
- ↑ Third edition, London, 1726.
