Note 380 — Chapter II

This has been disputed; cp. Berdoe, Origin of the Healing Art, 1893, p.72; Withington, Medical History from the Earliest Times, 1894, pp. 21-22. But the Greeks could hardly have resorted to the Egyptians so much as they admittedly did for mathematical and astronomical teaching in the early period without learning something of their medicine. Cp. Berdoe, bk. ii, ch. i, and Kenrick, Ancient Egypt, 1850, i, 345-48, as to Egyptian medicine. The passage in the Odyssey, iv, 227-32, is decisive as to its repute in early Greece. Certainly it was stationary, like everything Egyptian. Whether the Indian and Egyptian medicine found "neue Bedeutung" in Greek hands, after the fresh contacts made under Alexander, as is claimed by Droysen (Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen, 3te Aufl. pp. 367-68), is another question.