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cations holding the chief place, while clinical instruction, though not neglected, was incompletely provided for by the private practice of the teacher. There were dispensaries or private nursing homes, such as Aelian speaks of as gossiping centres, and as the means whereby charlatanry was cultivated.
The medical obligations imposed were various, positive and negative. The good of the patient is the first object, and for that purpose dietary of a right sort was to be ordained. Later times read in this mere diet, but the Hippocratic dietary included everything—food, baths, exercises. Cervantes admirably caricatures the absurdity of medical practice in his time when he shows the Governor of Barataria in risk of starvation, his physician ordering everything away as it was presented at his table. The fanciful physiology of an unscientific age did what is now effected by food-chemistry run to seed. Having some acquaintance with gout, I know that a diet dictated by the books would be nearly as unsatisfying as that of Barataria. But the need of care in regulating diet in the Hippocratic wide sense was justly insisted on. We know that a convalescent from typhoid may be killed by so innocent an article as a custard: ancient cooking offered a good many even more noxious substances, fraught with equal danger to a delicate stomach, while unwise bathing or inopportune exercise might upset the balance of not too stable health. The treatises De Balneis abounded, and their perusal makes one wonder how, dietary holding so many traps and atmospheric germs so many more, the human race has survived. Gabriel Bachtischua was imprisoned by Harun Al-Rashīd because he plainly told the monarch that his evil plight was the inevitable consequence of his disobedience to Gabriel’s regulations. The physician of Antigonus was sent to prison for declaring the case of a courtier incurable, while a more supple adviser held the opposite, and even relieved the sufferer. But death followed soon after on a surfeit of unsuitable food, and the physician then explained that he knew the man's want of moderation to be beyond control: that was the incurable disease, not the immediate symptoms which might be alleviated.
The obligation not to administer poison belongs to a curious chapter of medical and social history. Christianity which did