and there are professors as ready to give suggestive
interpretations to them, as in the days of Aristides.
As usual, Aristotle seems to have said the last word
on the subject: “Even scientific physicians
tell us that one should pay diligent attention to
dreams, and to hold this view is reasonable also for
those who are not practitioners but speculative philosophers,"(20)
but it is asking too much to think that the Deity
would trouble to send dreams to very simple people
and to animals, if they were designed in any way to
reveal the future.
In its struggle with Christianity, Paganism made its
last stand in the temples of Asklepios. The miraculous
healing of the saints superseded the cures of the
heathen god, and it was wise to adopt the useful practice
of his temple.
(18) Mary Hamilton:
Incubation, or the Cure of Disease in
Pagan Temples and Christian
Churches, London, 1906.
(19) Freud: The
Interpretation of Dreams, translation of
third edition by A.
A. Brill, 1913.
(20) Aristotle:
Parva Naturalia, De divinatione per
somnium, Ch. I,
Oxford ed., Vol. III, 463 a.
Deservedly the foundation of Greek Medicine is
associated with the name of Hippocrates, a native
of the island of Cos; and yet he is a shadowy personality,
about whom we have little accurate first-hand information.
This is in strong contrast to some of his distinguished
contemporaries and successors, for example, Plato
and Aristotle, about whom we have such full and accurate
knowledge. You will, perhaps, be surprised to
hear that the only contemporary mention of Hippocrates
is made by Plato. In the “Protagoras,”
the young Hippocrates, son of Apollodorus has come
to Protagoras, “that mighty wise man,”
to learn the science and knowledge of human life.
Socrates asked him: “If . . . you had thought
of going to Hippocrates of Cos, the Asclepiad, and
were about to give him your money, and some one had
said to you, ’You are paying money to your namesake
Hippocrates, O Hippocrates; tell me, what is he that
you give him money?’ how would you have answered?”
“I should say,” he replied, “that
I gave money to him as a physician.” “And
what will he make of you?” “A physician,”
he said. And in the Phaedrus, in reply to a question
of Socrates whether the nature of the soul could be
known intelligently without knowing the nature of
the whole, Phaedrus replies: “Hippocrates,
the Asclepiad, says that the nature, even of the body,
can only be understood as a whole.” (Plato, I,
311; iii, 270—Jowett, I, 131, 479.)
