ce, Spain, and Italy to extend his knowledge. He took up permanent
residence in Rome, and became very celebrated. When he became too old to
continue active practice, he found leisure to write twelve books on
medical diseases, following to some extent the teaching of Galen. The
style of these books is elegant, and his description of diseases
accurate. Alexander of Tralles was the first to open the jugular vein
in disease, and employed iron and other useful remedies, but he lived
in superstitious times, and was very credulous. For epilepsy, he
recommended a piece of sail from a wrecked vessel, worn round the arm
for seven weeks.[30] For colic, he recommended the heart of a lark
attached to the right thigh, and for pain in the kidneys an amulet
depicting Hercules overcoming a lion. To exorcise gout, he used
incantations, these being either oral or written on a thin sheet of gold
during the waning of the moon. Writing a suitable inscription on an
olive leaf, gathered before sunrise, was his specific for ague.
Alexander appears at times to have doubted the efficacy of such remedies
as amulets, for he explains that his rich patients would not submit to
rational treatment, and it was necessary, therefore, to use other
methods reputed to be curative.

In the age of Justinian great scourges devastated the world. In A.D. 526
Antioch was destroyed by an earthquake, and it is said that 250,000
people perished, but the most dreadful visitation on mankind was the
great plague which raged in A.D. 542 and the following years, and, as
Gibbon writes, "depopulated the earth in the time of Justinian and his
successors." _Procopius_, who was versed in medicine, was the historian
of the period. This fell disease began between the Serbonian bog and
the eastern channel of the Nile. "From thence, tracing as it were a
double path, it spread to the east, over Syria, Persia, and the Indies,
and penetrated to the west, along the coast of Africa, and over the
continent of Europe. In the spring of the second year, Constantinople,
during three or four months, was visited by the pestilence; and
Procopius, who observed its progress and symptoms with the eyes of a
physician, has emulated the skill and diligence of Thucydides in the
latter's description of the plague of Athens. The infection was
sometimes announced by the visions of a distempered fancy, and the
victim despaired as soon as he had heard the menace and felt the stroke
of an invisible spectre