Greek medicine is one of the most remarkable achievements of the Greek mind, it reaches from a time somewhat before Hippocrates down to the time of Galen and Celsus, it ranges from prophylactic medicine and dietary medicine to surgery, it includes a great deal of valid anatomical research as well as a fully developed herbal pharmacopoeia. Since the beginning of the l9 century, Greek medicine has ceased to be the reigning medical art of our world, we have gone further than our fathers and grandfathers would have thought possible, and we are on the edge of still greater forward strides. In view of our accelerating medical acceleration, it is important to trace the discipline back to its origins, not only in order to document the early history of medical science, but in order to isolate the germs of imaginative thought which guided the Greeks on the road to the medical art. Some of these elements of medical thought are to be found centuries before Hippocrates, buried in the myths of the early Greeks, and some evidence of millennia of experimentation with herbal materials can be found in the early mythological tradition as well as in the later manual of Dioscorides. What medical matters we find in the myths may be primitive, but they are the first stumbling steps of thinking men trying to find the road to medical understanding, and as such they are to be observed carefully, and they are to be respected.

William Harris, Prof. Em. Middlebury College

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Update 28-3-2004