CHAP. 2.—PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO HIPPOCRATES. DATE OF THE ORIGINS OF CLINICAL PRACTICE AND OF THAT OF IATRALIPTICS.
Its succeeding history, a fact that is truly marvellous, remains enveloped in the densest night, down to the time of the Peloponnesian War;2454 at which period it was restored to light by the agency of Hippocrates, a native of Cos, an island flourishing and powerful in the highest degree, and consecrated to Æsculapius. It being the practice for persons who had recovered from a disease to describe in the temple of that god the remedies to which they had owed their restoration to health, that others might derive benefit therefrom in a similar emergency; Hippocrates, it is said, copied out these prescriptions, and, as our fellow-countryman Varro will have it, after burning the temple to the ground,2455 instituted that branch of medical practice which is known as “Clinics.”2456 There was no limit after this to the profits derived from the practice of medicine; for Prodicus,2457 a native of Selymbria, one of his disciples, founded the branch of it known as “Iatraliptics,”2458 and so discovered a means of enriching the very anointers even and the commonest drudges2459 employed by the physicians.