Whether a plaything of the gods or a cog in the wheels of the universe this was the problem which life offered to the thinking Greek; and in undertaking its solution, he set in motion the forces that have made our modern civilization.  That the problem remains unsolved is nothing in comparison with the supreme fact that in wrestling with it, and in studying the laws of the machine, man is learning to control the small section of it with which he is specially concerned.  The veil of thaumaturgy which shrouded the Orient, while not removed, was rent in twain, and for the first time in history, man had a clear vision of the world about him—­“had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness” ("Adonais”) unabashed and unaffrighted by the supernatural powers about him.  Not that the Greek got rid of his gods—­far from it!—­but he made them so like himself, and lived on terms of such familiarity with them that they inspired no terror.(2)

(2) “They made deities in their own image, in the likeness of an image of corruptible man.  Sua cuique deu fit dira cupido.  ‘Each man’s fearful passion becomes his god.’  Yes, and not passions only, but every impulse, every aspiration, every humour, every virtue, every whim.  In each of his activities the Greek found something wonderful, and called it God:  the hearth at which he warmed himself and cooked his food, the street in which his house stood, the horse he rode, the cattle he pastured, the wife he married, the child that was born to him, the plague of which he died or from which he recovered, each suggested a deity, and he made one to preside over each.  So too with qualities and powers more abstract.”  R.W.  Livingstone:  The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us, pp. 51-52.

Livingstone discusses the Greek Genius as displayed to us in certain “notes”—­the Note of Beauty—­the Desire for Freedom—­the Note of Directness—­the Note of Humanism—­the Note of Sanity and of Many-sidedness.  Upon some of these characteristics we shall have occasion to dwell in the brief sketch of the rise of scientific medicine among this wonderful people.

We have seen that the primitive man and in the great civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia, the physician evolved from the priest—­in Greece he had a dual origin, philosophy and religion.  Let us first trace the origins in the philosophers, particularly in the group known as the Ionian Physiologists, whether at home or as colonists in the south of Italy, in whose work the beginnings of scientific medicine may be found.  Let me quote a statement from Gomperz: 

“We can trace the springs of Greek success achieved and maintained by the great men of Hellas on the field of scientific inquiry to a remarkable conjunction of natural gifts and conditions.  There was the teeming wealth of constructive imagination united with the sleepless critical spirit which shrank from no test of audacity; there was the most powerful impulse to generalization coupled with the sharpest faculty