amous expression, panta rhei,--"all things are flowing,"--expresses
the incessant flux in which he believed and in which we know all matter
exists. No one has said a ruder thing of the profession, for an extant
fragment reads: ". . . physicians, who cut, burn, stab, and rack the
sick, then complain that they do not get any adequate recompense for
it."(4)

(4) J. Burnet: Early Greek Philosophy, 1892, p. 137,
Bywater's no. LVIII.

The South Italian nature philosophers contributed much more to the
science of medicine, and in certain of the colonial towns there were
medical schools as early as the fifth century B.C. The most famous of
these physician philosophers was Pythagoras, whose life and work had an
extraordinary influence upon medicine, particularly in connection
with his theory of numbers, and the importance of critical days. His
discovery of the dependence of the pitch of sound on the length of the
vibrating chord is one of the most fundamental in acoustics. Among the
members of the school which he founded at Crotona were many physicians.
who carried his views far and wide throughout Magna Graecia. Nothing in
his teaching dominated medicine so much as the doctrine of numbers, the
sacredness of which seems to have had an enduring fascination for the
medical mind. Many of the common diseases, such as malaria, or typhus,
terminating abruptly on special days, favored this belief. How dominant
it became and how persistent you may judge from the literature upon
critical days, which is rich to the middle of the eighteenth century.

One member of the Crotonian school, Alcmaeon, achieved great distinction
in both anatomy and physiology. He first recognized the brain as the
organ of the mind, and made careful dissections of the nerves, which he
traced to the brain. He described the optic nerves and the Eustachian
tubes, made correct observations upon vision, and refuted the common
view that the sperma came from the spinal cord. He suggested the
definition of health as the maintenance of equilibrium, or an "isonomy"
in the material qualities of the body. Of all the South Italian
physicians of this period, the personality of none stands out in
stronger outlines than that of Empedocles of Agrigentum--physician,
physiologist, religious teacher, politician and poet. A wonder-worker,
also, and magician, he was acclaimed in the cities as an immortal god
by countless thousands desiring oracles or begging the word of hea