< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu
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PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS.

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Respecting the state of things in Babylonia and Assyria, the evidence is not so clear. Says Lenormant of the Chaldæans:

"Il est curieux de noter que les trois parties qui composaient ainsi le grand ouvrage magique dont Sir Henry Rawlinson a retrouvé les débris, correspondent exactement aux trois classes de docteurs chaldéens que le livre de Daniel (i, 20; ii, 2 et 27; v, 11) énumère à côté des astrologues et des divins (kasdim et gazrim), c'est-à-dire les khartumin ou conjurateurs, les hakamin ou médecins, et les asaphin ou théosophes."

With like implications Prof. Sayce tells us that—

"The doctor had long been an institution in Assyria and Babyonia. It is true that the great bulk of the people had recourse to religious charms and ceremonies when they were ill, and ascribed their sickness to possession by demons instead of to natural causes. But there was a continually increasing number of the educated who looked for aid in their maladies rather to the physician with his medicine than to the sorcerer or priest with his charms."

But from these two statements taken together it may fairly be inferred that the doctors had arisen as one division of the priestly class.

Naturally it was with the Hebrews as with their more civilized neighbors. Says Gauthier—

"Chez les Juifs la médecine a été longtemps sacerdotale comme chez presque tous les anciens peuples; les Lévites etaient les seuls médecins. . . . Chez les plus anciens peuples de l'Asie, tels que les Indiens et les Perses, l'art de guérir était également exercé par les prêtres."

In later days this connection became less close, and there was a separation of the physician from the priest. Thus in Ecclesiasticus we read:—

"My son, in thy sickness be not negligent: but pray unto the Lord, and he will make thee whole. Leave off from sin, and order thine hands aright, and cleanse thy heart from all wickedness. Give a sweet savor, and a memorial of fine flour; and make a fat offering. Then give place to the physician, for the Lord hath created him; let him not go from thee, for thou hast need of him." (xxxviii, 15.)

Facts of congruous kinds are remarked on by Draper:—

"In the Talmudic literature there are all the indications of a transitional state, so far as medicine is concerned; supernatural seems to be passing into the physical, the ecclesiastical is mixed up with the exact: thus a rabbi may cure disease by the ecclesiastical operation of laying on of hands; but of febrile disturbances, an exact, though erroneous explanation is given, and paralysis of the hind legs of an animal is correctly referred to the pressure of a tumor on the spinal cord."

Concerning the origin of the medical man among the Hindus, whose history is so much complicated by successively superposed governments and religions, the evidence is confused. Accounts

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