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as well as from sensuality with man or woman, bond or free, whose body I have to cure. Whatever I shall hear or see, even when not called in for medical attendance, whatever I shall come to know in the ordinary intercourse of life, which it would be improper to repeat, I shall keep silence regarding it. I shall hold it secret. May I, keeping this oath in its entirety, enjoy my life and art in happiness, and have credit among all men for all time. May the opposite befall me if I break it.'
Hippocrates was an Asclepiad, seventeenth or nineteenth in descent from Aesculapius, the son of Apollo and Coronis, but the term Asclepiad came latterly to mean a member of the medical fraternity. The appeal is strengthened by the invocation of the divine progenitor, of the human ancestor and his daughters, Health and All-heal, as well as of all the powers of Olympus. The Asclepiad key-note is struck when the teacher is acknowledged as in a quasi-parental relation, in Hippocrates' case it was one of real paternity—when responsibility for his maintenance is accepted, and his children, at least his sons, are adopted as brothers. They are to receive gratuitous uncovenanted instruction, and no one beyond the circle of brotherhood by the flesh or by adoption is to be initiated in the art unless he covenants and swears himself into the confraternity. It was indeed a close guild, and so remained until a recent time, apprenticeship being the chief avenue to the profession, in which none could enrol unless as a pupil of some master. The check on the admission of outsiders, at least in undue numbers, was as rigidly enforced as in a trades union, or in that elder brother of the union, the guildry of our large towns. To these latter admission was restricted to descendants, or it any were assumed from the outside, they came in "at the far hand" and paid at a higher rate. Of the professional bulwark the last trace was removed when the University Commissioners practically ended the gratuitous instruction of professors' sons.
The kinds of instruction are not certainly defined. In later times the reader in medicine prelected from prescribed books of Hippocrates or Avicenna, and in the seventeenth century the student at Padua listened for three years to certain books as the main source of his instruction. In the Hippocratic period oral instruction was paramount, the future Aphorisms and Prognosti-
