DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9184#0380
( 357 )
CHAPTER XII.
EPIDAURUS AND ANCIENT MEDICINE.
The feeling of the noblest of the Greeks in regard to
medicine is well set forth in the third book of Plato's
Republic* " Do you not hold it disgraceful to require
medical aid, unless it be for a wound, or an attack of
illness incidental to the time of year,—to require it, I
mean, owing to our laziness, and the life we lead, and
to get ourselves so stuffed with humours and wind, like
quagmires, as to compel the clever sons of Asclepius
to call diseases by such names as flatulence and catarrh."
'Asclepius was aware that in all well-regulated com-
munities each man has a work assigned to him in the
State, which he must needs do, and that no one has
leisure to spend his life as an invalid in the doctor's
hands." Primitive doctrine truly! and sounding strangely
out of date in an age when many of our great physicians
spend all their lives in patching up the constitutions of
those who are openly at war with the ordinances of
mother nature, or in protracting for a few years the
sufferings of those whom they cannot hope to cure.
Plato recognises as a true art the gymnastic, which
trains healthy bodies to be active and vigorous and
useful, and stigmatises as a false art the medicine which
would relieve and perpetuate a life radically unhealthy.
But even in Plato's time this must have been doctrine
* Pp. 405, 406. Translation of Davies and Vaughan.
CHAPTER XII.
EPIDAURUS AND ANCIENT MEDICINE.
The feeling of the noblest of the Greeks in regard to
medicine is well set forth in the third book of Plato's
Republic* " Do you not hold it disgraceful to require
medical aid, unless it be for a wound, or an attack of
illness incidental to the time of year,—to require it, I
mean, owing to our laziness, and the life we lead, and
to get ourselves so stuffed with humours and wind, like
quagmires, as to compel the clever sons of Asclepius
to call diseases by such names as flatulence and catarrh."
'Asclepius was aware that in all well-regulated com-
munities each man has a work assigned to him in the
State, which he must needs do, and that no one has
leisure to spend his life as an invalid in the doctor's
hands." Primitive doctrine truly! and sounding strangely
out of date in an age when many of our great physicians
spend all their lives in patching up the constitutions of
those who are openly at war with the ordinances of
mother nature, or in protracting for a few years the
sufferings of those whom they cannot hope to cure.
Plato recognises as a true art the gymnastic, which
trains healthy bodies to be active and vigorous and
useful, and stigmatises as a false art the medicine which
would relieve and perpetuate a life radically unhealthy.
But even in Plato's time this must have been doctrine
* Pp. 405, 406. Translation of Davies and Vaughan.