That of Cyrene was famous on account not only of its medical teaching, but from the fact that mathematics and philosophy were industriously pursued there. The teaching in all these schools must have been of a very high order; for, though unfortunately little of it has descended directly to us, we have sufficient evidence of its importance in such fragments as are to be found incorporated with the works of Hippocrates, such as the _Coan Prognostics_ and the _Cnidian Sentences_; the former, a miscellaneous collection of the observations made by the physician of Cos, and the latter, a work attributed to Euryphon, a celebrated physician of Cnidos (about the former half of the fifth century B.C.).
Experiment and observation were insisted upon in the study of anatomy and physiology. Galen tells us in his second book, _On Anatomical Manipulations_: “I do not blame the ancients, who did not write books on anatomical manipulations; though I praise Marinus, who did. For it was superfluous for them to compose such records for themselves or others, while they were, from their childhood, exercised by their parents in dissecting, just as familiarly as in writing and reading; so that there was no more fear of their forgetting their anatomy than of their forgetting their alphabet. But when grown men, as well as children, were taught, this thorough discipline fell off; and, the art being carried out of the family of the Asclepiads, and declining by repeated transmission, books became necessary for the student.”
The method of the Asclepiadæ was one of true induction; much was imperfect in their efforts to arrive at the beginning of medical science. They had little light, and often stumbled; but they made the best use of what they had, and with all their deviations they always returned to the right path, and kept their faces towards the light. Hippocrates was of them; and Bacon of Verulam, in the centuries to come, followed and developed the same method. Dr. Adams remarks the assiduous observation and abundant rational experience which led them to enunciate such a law of nature as this: “Those things which bring alleviation with bad signs, and do not remit with good, are troublesome and difficult.”