Some Aspects of Medicine and Literature

I have decided to address you this morning on some aspects of the relationship of medicine and literature, a vast subject on which I can only touch very superficially in the time at my disposal. Throughout the ages we find medicine and literature in close association, and even the early Egyptian papyri and the tablets of the Assyrio-Babylonian epoch have extensive reference to the medical science of the dawn of civilization. The early medicine of Greece was largely the cult of Aesculapius, and his followers were an organized guild of physicians, the Asclepiads; the most famous of their temples were founded at C6s, Epidaurus, Cnidus, and Pergamus. These temples, skilfully constructed and laid out on wooded hills near mineral springs, became popular sanatoria, managed by trained priests. Their administration corresponded fairly closely to that of a modern health resort; the patient, after the sacrifice of a cock or a ram, was inducted in the rite of incubation or temple-sleep. This consisted of lying down in the sanctuary, where, during the night, the priest, in the guise of a god, presented himself before the patient to administer medical advice, if the patient happened to be awake. If he slept, as was usually the case, the advice came in the form of a dream, afterwards interpreted by the priest. The whole rite has been humorously described in the Plutus of Aristophanes, and in a more dignified way by Walter Pater in "Marius the Epicurean." Many auxiliary aids such as baths, massage, and graduated exercises were also employed. It was from this cult that Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was descended. He was born on the island of C6s about 460 B.C., and received his medical education from his father. He dissociated medicine from philosophy and theurgy, and crystallized the knowledge of his predecessors into a systematic science. He likewise gave medicine the greatest moral inspiration it possesses. All that a man of genius could do for medicine, with no other instrument of precision than his own open mind, his keen senses, and his honesty, he accomplished, and his descriptions of disease are still models of their kind even today. Hippocrates was not acquainted with experiment as an active science, and his central doctrine, the humoral pathology, has long since been discarded, but no one ever profited more fully from experience. Of a series of forty-two clinical cases in the writings of Hippocrates-the …