Let us first trace the
origins in the philosophers, particularly in the group known as the
Ionian Physiologists, whether at home or as colonists in the south of
Italy, in whose work the beginnings of scientific medicine may be found.
Let me quote a statement from Gomperz:
"We can trace the springs of Greek success achieved and maintained
by the great men of Hellas on the field of scientific inquiry to a
remarkable conjunction of natural gifts and conditions. There was the
teeming wealth of constructive imagination united with the sleepless
critical spirit which shrank from no test of audacity; there was the
most powerful impulse to generalization coupled with the sharpest
faculty for descrying and distinguishing the finest shades of phenomenal
peculiarity; there was the religion of Hellas, which afforded complete
satisfaction to the requirements of sentiment, and yet left the
intelligence free to perform its destructive work; there were the
political conditions of a number of rival centres of intellect, of
a friction of forces, excluding the possibility of stagnation, and,
finally, of an order of state and society strict enough to curb the
excesses of 'children crying for the moon,' and elastic enough not to
hamper the soaring flight of superior minds.
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