authorized remedies; and he adds that Galen further emphasizes the duty of the physician to employ them when other measures fail, or when the patients themselves frankly confess that they have faith in their efficacy and therefore wish them to be tried. Alexander also makes the statement that Galen, after treating for a long time all reports about the beneficial results obtained from the employment of magical measures as old women's tales, had finally decided that these benefits were at times marvelous and should be accepted as genuine by physicians even if they are unable to explain them.
How much Alexander of Tralles really believed in these supernatural agents, or to what extent he relied upon their effect in influencing the imagination, we may not know; but his was an age of superstition, and the conditions governing society at that time were very different from those which control the world at the present day.
Paulus Aegineta.—Paulus Aegineta[1] was born in the Island of Aegina, not far from Athens, in the early part of the seventh century A. D., and practiced medicine in Alexandria, Egypt. He is known to us as the author of a compend of medicine which was very popular during a long period of time, especially among the Arabs, who, as early as two hundred years after his death, translated his work from the Greek into their own language. At a still later period it was also translated into Latin, the two best versions in this language which we now possess being those of Guintherus Andernacus (Paris, 1532) and of J. Cornarius (Basel, 1556). There is also an English translation by F. Adams ("The Seven Books of Paulus Aegineta," London, 1845-1847), which is favorably spoken of by Neuburger, and which is apparently at the present time the only existing version of the work of Paulus of Aegina in a modern European language; for the French translation by René Briau ("La Chirurgie de Paul d'Égine," Paris, 1855) comprises only Book VI.
The contents of the entire work are as follows: Book I.—Dietetics of Pregnant Women and of Children;
- ↑ Also written Paulus Aeginetes.
