To check excess of motion, he seems to have very rarely used opium. In what he styles strangulations of the uterus, he advises the soporific meconium: the seems to be the papaver spumeum, the peplium, perhaps the wild purslain. He recommends the mandragora in a dose below that, which produces delirium, and thinks it useful in the violent paroxysms to which those affected with melancholia are sometimes subject. The juice of the mandragora, and the wild cucurbit diluted with milk, is to be injected into the anus to relieve prolapsus, or bleeding piles, and into the vagina to evacuate the vessels of the uterus. But to cure quartans he mixed the mandragora with hyoscyamus, silphium (probably asafoetida,) and trefoil, giving them together in wine.

To correct rigidity he employed baths, fumigations, and gargles. Oils, impregnated with different flowers, sometimes with aromatics, were also freely ordered; cataplasms and ointments, sometimes stiffened with wax, but scarcely in any instance consolidated into what may be now called a plaster, were frequently employed. The oils were generally rubbed in after exercise, and thence called acopa, relievers of fatigue. It was an idle fancy of the alchemists that Hippocrates was an experienced chemist.

The surgery of Hippocrates is scattered through a great number of tracts, but this part of the subject has been anticipated in the history of surgery. (See Chirur gia.) Yet, on recurring to that article with a more circumspect eye, we perceive omissions which we shall now endeavour to supply.

A minute attention, which seems to have prevailed in the Gnidian school, to the form of bandages, he rejects as rather curious than useful. The patient, he remarks, requires assistance, not ornament; and whatever does not contribute to his ease or his relief, he thinks undeserving of attention. He penetrated bones with an instrument not unlike the modern trephine, and even the ribs, to evacuate water collected in the chest. The management of fractures, though the instruments were somewhat rude, seems, on the whole, judicious: no plasters were applied till ' after the sera of Paulus AEgineta. The eye, in inflammations, was scarified by the friction of the rough Milesian wool.

We have enlarged on this subject because we have not found the Coan system fully and impartially stated; and because the practice of Hippocrates, like an overruling genius, has continued to lead us, by imperceptible threads, even to the present aera. Subsequent to. his time his descendants and disciples continued in the same line, and for many ages little improvement was made in practice, and but few innovations occurred in physiology. For the latter we are indebted to Plato, whose fancies on this subject are amusing, and, but that we have little room for amusement only, might for some time detain us. The names of Hippocrates' successors, and we could add scarcely any thing to the catalogue, would not be interesting; but we were somewhat surprised among them to find the elder and younger Dionysius. We could easily conceive that the elder, as was reported, delighted in witnessing the most painful surgical operations; but the idle dissipated character of the younger forbad us to expect from him any mental exertion. It is suggested, however, that the barbers and perfumers shops, for he was as condescending and familiar as our fifth Henry when prince of Wales, were called and that it might therefore be truly said that his time was employed but not in medical disquisitions.

From the time of Hippocrates to that of Ptolemy Philadelphus few were the medical practitioners, and these rather distinguished for fancy and refinement than any improvement in the art. Diodes, already noticed in the history of surgery, rescues this period from total insignificance. Yet, even at this time, when authors contended that no blood naturally entered the arteries, and the arterial vibrations were attributed to a pulsific conatus, the pulse was attended to and employed among other prognostics. The fame, however, of the medical practitioners was eclipsed by that of Aristotle, who flourished at this time; a man to whom every branch of natural science was highly indebted, who alone united the most comprehensive views, the acutest genius, and the most unremitting diligence, and who has only been disregarded by those who have not talents to appreciate his labours. His two books on medicine are unfortunately lost; his anatomy, in the works which remain, is not on the whole correct, and his physiology somewhat fanciful. These were, however, the faults of his aera, not his own. Whatever were the errors of his physiology, and philosophy, both were adopted in general by Galen, and more exclusively by the Arabians; so that their effects were most extensive. The vast knowledge which Aristotle possessed in the three kingdoms of nature is sufficiently understood; to his instructions we are indebted for what Theophrastus has collected, and perhaps for the fatal knowledge which Thrasyas is said to have possessed of the deleterious qualities of vegetables. The other physicians of this aera do not merit the slightest notice.

The prominent objects which next offer themselves to our attention are Herophilus and Erasistratus, the great founders of the Alexandrian school, at least the powerful supporters of its credit. Frasistratus we have styled the elder, but the chronology of this very early period is uncertain. Erasistratus was a physician of some eminence, but he applied to anatomy at a very late period of his life, and with great candour recanted, in consequence of his discoveries, some of his early opinions. He certainly approached very near the secret of the circulation, but could not understand the use of a double heart. He supposed digestion to be performed by attrition, and violently opposed the humoral pathology of his predecessors. His own system rested on the idea of the arteries containing only a spirit, and that diseases, particularly fevers and inflammations, arose from their admitting blood. He was apprehensive of bleeding, lest the blood should find a way from the veins to the arteries; of purging, because Pythagoras had forbidden it. He reduced his patients by abstinence, or by violent exercise: venesection he supplied by ligatures; purgatives by slight emetics, or by clysters. He recommended simple medicines, and violently reprobated the complicated formulae of that aera.