for imagining that he was no stranger to the habits and training of his
contemporary Hippocrates, and the other Asclepiads of Cos.

It is hardly within the province of a historian of Greece to repeat
after Thucydides the painful enumeration of symptoms, violent in the
extreme and pervading every portion of the bodily system, which marked
this fearful disorder. Beginning in Piraeus, it quickly passed into the
city, and both the one and the other was speedily filled with sickness
and suffering, the like of which had never before been known. The
seizures were sudden, and a large proportion of the sufferers perished
after deplorable agonies on the seventh or on the ninth day. Others,
whose strength of constitution carried them over this period, found
themselves the victims of exhausting and incurable diarrhoea afterward;
with others again, after traversing both these stages, the distemper
fixed itself in some particular member, the eyes, the genitals, the
hands, or the feet, which were rendered permanently useless, or in some
cases amputated, even where the patient himself recovered.

There were also some whose recovery was attended with a total loss of
memory, so that they no more knew themselves or recognized their
friends. No treatment or remedy appearing, except in accidental cases,
to produce any beneficial effect, the physicians or surgeons whose aid
was invoked became completely at fault. While trying their accustomed
means without avail, they soon ended by catching the malady themselves
and perishing. The charms and incantations, to which the unhappy patient
resorted, were not likely to be more efficacious. While some asserted
that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the cisterns of water, others
referred the visitation to the wrath of the gods, and especially to
Apollo, known by hearers of the _Iliad_ as author of pestilence in the
Greek host before Troy. It was remembered that this Delphian god had