was consecrated by Pope Felix IV to the
honour of the saints, Cosma and Damiano, two Arabian _anargyri_ (unpaid
physicians) who suffered martyrdom under Diocletian.

The date of Galen's death is not exactly known, but was probably A.D.
200.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Dr. Bostock's "History of Medicine."

[24] "Paulus AEgineta," vol. iii, p. 74.

[25] _Ibid._, p. 242.

[26] "Encyl. Brit.," Surgery.

CHAPTER X.

THE LATER ROMAN AND BYZANTINE PERIOD.

Beginning of Decline--Neoplatonism--Antyllus--Oribasius--Magnus--
Jacobus Psychristus--Adamantius--Meletius--Nemesius--AEtius--
Alexander of Tralles--The Plague--Moschion--Paulus AEgineta--Decline
of Healing Art.

The death of Galen marks the beginning of the decline of medical science
in ancient times, and this decline was contemporaneous with the
overthrow of the Roman State. As everybody knows, the decline and fall
of the Roman Empire resulted from the profligacy and incapacity of the
emperors, luxurious living and vice among the people, tyranny of an
overbearing soldiery at home, and the attacks of barbarian foes
gradually increasing in strength. Rome fell quickly into the hands of
the barbarians, and her power was broken. In A.D. 395, was founded the
Byzantine Empire, also styled the East Roman, Greek, or Lower Empire,
which lasted for more than a thousand years, and took its name from the
capital, Byzantium or Constantinople. In this empire medical science
maintained a feeble and sickly existence. During this _Byzantine Period_
there were a few physicians of note, but they were mainly commentators,
and medical science retrograded rather than progressed.

_Neoplatonism_ exerted a powerful influence upon the healing art. It was
founded by Plotinus, and was for three centuries a formidable rival to
Christianity. The Neoplatonists believed that man could intuitively know
the absolute by a faculty called _Ecstasy_. Neoplatonism is a term which
covers a very wide range of varying thought; essentially, it was a
combination of philosophy and religion, arising from the intellectual
movement in Alexandria. It covered a great deal of mysticism, magic and
spiritualism, and the followers of the system, as it developed, became
believers in the efficacy of certain exercises and symbols to cure
diseases. They entered as Kingsley wrote, "the fairy land of ecstasy,
clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by the effect of
what we now call m