Asclepiades

Asclepiades, a Greek physician, born at Prusa, in Bithynia, who flourished during the early part of the 1st century B.C. He seems to have wandered about as a not very successful teacher of rhetoric, before he finally settled at Rome, where, by the practice of medicine, he had risen in Cicero's time to considerable fame and wealth. He was opposed to the principles of Hippocrates. Pliny, who professes very little respect for him, reduces his medicinal remedies to five: abstinence from flesh, abstinence from wine under certain circumstances, friction, walking, and 'gestation' or carriage exercise, by which he proposed to open the pores, and let the corpuscles which caused disease escape in perspiration; for his leading doctrine was, that all disease rose from an inharmonious distribution of the small, formless corpuscles of which the body was composed. He also employed emetics and bleeding, but in general consulted the tastes and whims of his patients; his maxim being, that a physician ought to cure surely, swiftly, and agreeably. He is said to have been the first who distinguished between acute and chronic diseases, and the invention of laryngotomy is also ascribed to him; but his knowledge of anatomy was apparently very slight. Gumpert edited the fragments of his writings (Weimar, 1798).