ASCLEPIADES, of Prusa, in Bithynia, was a physician of great celebrity and influence, who flourished at Rome in the beginning of the first century B.C. He passed his earlier years at Alexandria, then went to Athens, where he studied rhetoric and medicine. He is said to have travelled much. He ultimately settled at Rome as a rhetorician. He was the friend of Cicero. Being unsuccessful as a teacher of rhetoric, he devoted himself to medicine. He was a man of great natural ability, but he was quite ignorant of anatomy and physiology; so he decried the labours of those who studied these sciences, and violently attacked Hippocrates. His conduct was that of an early Paracelsus. He had many pupils, and the school they founded was afterwards called that of the Methodists. His system was original, though it owed somewhat to the Epicurean philosophy. He conceived the idea that disease arose in the atoms and corpuscles composing the body, by a want of harmony in their motion. Harmony was health; discord, disease. Naturally his treatment was as pleasant as that of the most fashionable modern physician. He paid great attention to diet, passive motions, frictions after the method now called massage, and the use of cold sponging. He entirely rejected the humoral pathology of Hippocrates, and totally denied his doctrine of crises, declared that the physician alone cures, nature merely supplying the opportunities. His famous motto was that the physician should cure “tuto, celeriter, ac jucunde.” In the beginning of fevers he refused his patients permission even to rinse the mouth. He originated the method of cyclical cures by adopting certain methods of treatment at definite periods. He first applied the term “phrenitis” in the sense of mental disturbance. In drugs he was a sceptic, but he allowed a liberal use of wine. He was said to have experimented in physiology, though he knew nothing of it. Tertullian ridicules him thus: “Asclepiades may investigate goats, which bleat without a heart, and drive away flies, which fly without a head.”
Asclepiades must have been a great deal more than a charlatan, for many of his fundamental ideas have persisted even to the present time. He was the first to distinguish diseases into acute and chronic.[454] Acute diseases he supposed to depend “upon a constriction of the pores, or an obstruction of them by a superfluity of atoms; the chronic upon a relaxation of the pores, or a deficiency of the atoms.” Asclepiades was the inventor of many new methods in surgery and medicine. Amongst these was bronchotomy for the relief of suffocation.[455] He practised tracheotomy in angina, and scarification of the ankles in dropsy, and recommended tapping with the smallest possible wound. He also observed spontaneous dislocation of the hip joint.[456] Such things do not emanate from mere quacks.