se
on Simple Medicines and Ailments," a treatise on the "Elements," and a
treatise "On the Urine." Besides these, we have from him shorter works,
"On the Pulse," "On Melancholy," and "On Dropsy." His hope with regard
to his fame from these works was fulfilled, for they were printed as
late as 1515 at Leyden, and Sprengel declared them the best compendium
of simple remedies and diet that we have from the Arabian times. One of
his translators into Latin has called him the monarch of physicians.

Some of his maxims are extremely interesting in the light of modern
notions on the same subjects. He declared emphatically that "the most
important duty of the physician is to prevent illness." "Most patients
get better without much help from the physician by the power of nature."
He emphasized his distrust of using many medicines at the same time in
the hope that some of them would do good. He laid it down as a rule:
"Employ only one medicine at a time in all your cases and note its
effects carefully." He was as wise with regard to medical ethics as
therapeutics. He advised a young physician, "Never speak unfavorably of
other physicians. Every one of us has his lucky and unlucky hours." It
is pleasant to learn that the old gentleman lived to fill out a full
hundred years of life, and that in his declining years he was
surrounded by the good will and the affection of many who had learned to
know his precious qualities of heart and mind. More than of any other
class of physicians do we find the large human sympathies of the Jewish
physicians of the Middle Ages praised by their contemporaries and
succeeding generations.

During the next centuries a number of Jewish physicians became
prominent, though none of them until Maimonides impressed themselves
deeply upon the medical life of their own and succeeding centuries. Very
frequently they were the physicians to royal personages. Zedkias, for
instance, was the physician to Louis the Pious and later to his son
Charles the Bald. His reputation as a physician was great enough to give
him the popular estimation of a magician, but it did not save him from
the accusation of having poisoned Charles when that monarch died
suddenly. There seem to be no good grounds, however, for the accusation.
There were a number of schools of medicine, in Sicily and the southern
part of Italy, in which Jewish, Arabian, and Christian physicians taught
side by side. One of these teachers was Jude Sabatai Ben