Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/243

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"is to appreciate correctly the intensity of the disease, and that is something which Mesué, with all his learning, is not able to do." However, despite the death-bed warning given by Salmouïh to Motassem, this ruler died less than two years later from the effects of the treatment which Mesué the Elder, who had been called in to prescribe for his Highness, had ordered.

In addition to the pupils already mentioned there are a few others who, according to the testimony of Le Clerc, reflected some credit upon the institution in which they acquired their medical training. But enough has already been said, I believe, to establish the fact that, in this remote Persian province of Khorassan (to the west of the country known to-day as Afghanistan), there existed during the eighth and ninth centuries of the present era a most efficient medical school, which was entirely managed by Nestorian Christians, and which sent out into the world trained physicians of the very highest type.