In treatment he had not
the simplicity of Hippocrates: he had great faith in drugs and collected
plants from all parts of the known world, for the sale of which he
is said to have had a shop in the neighborhood of the Forum. As I
mentioned, he was an eclectic, held himself aloof from the various
schools of the day, calling no man master save Hippocrates. He might
be called a rational empiricist. He made war on the theoretical
practitioners of the day, particularly the Methodists, who, like some
of their modern followers, held that their business was with the disease
and not with the conditions out of which it arose.
No other physician has ever occupied the commanding position of
"Clarissimus" Galenus. For fifteen centuries he dominated medical
thought as powerfully as did Aristotle in the schools. Not until the
Renaissance did daring spirits begin to question the infallibility of
this medical pope. But here we must part with the last and, in many
ways, the greatest of the Greeks--a man very much of our own type, who,
could he visit this country today, might teach us many lessons. He would
smile in scorn at the water supply of many of our cities, thinking
of the magnificent aqueducts of Rome and of many of the colonial
towns--some still in use--which in lightness of structure and in
durability testify to the astonishing skill of their engineers.
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