Their bold generalizations on the
nature of matter and of the elements are still the wonder of chemists.
We may trace to one of them, Anaximenes, who regarded air as the primary
principle, the doctrine of the "pneuma," or the breath of life--the
psychic force which animates the body and leaves it at death--"Our
soul being air, holds us together." Of another, the famous Heraclitus,
possibly a physician, the existing fragments do not relate specially to
medicine; but to the philosopher of fire may be traced the doctrine of
heat and moisture, and their antitheses, which influenced practice
for many centuries. There is evidence in the Hippocratic treatise peri
sarkwn of an attempt to apply this doctrine to the human body. The
famous expression, panta rhei,--"all things are flowing,"--expresses
the incessant flux in which he believed and in which we know all matter
exists. No one has said a ruder thing of the profession, for an extant
fragment reads: ". . . physicians, who cut, burn, stab, and rack the
sick, then complain that they do not get any adequate recompense for
it."(4)
(4) J. Burnet: Early Greek Philosophy, 1892, p. 137,
Bywater's no. LVIII.
The South Italian nature philosophers contributed much more to the
science of medicine, and in certain of the colonial towns there were
medical schools as early as the fifth century B.
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