of the higher criticism. He is eminently in a position, therefore, to state the case with regard to St. Luke fully, and to indicate absolutely the conclusions that should be drawn from the premises of fact, writings, and traditions that we have. He does so in a very striking way. Perhaps no better example of his thoroughly lucid and eminently logical mode of argumentation is to be found than the paragraph in which he states the question. It might well be recommended as an example of terse forcefulness and logical sequence that deserves the emulation of all those who want to write on medical subjects. If we had more of these characteristic qualities of Harnack's style, our medical literature, so called, would not need to occupy so many pages of print as it does-yet would say more. Here it is:

St. Luke, according to St. Paul, was a physician. When a physician writes a historical work it does not necessarily follow that his profession shows itself in his writing; yet it is only natural for one to look for traces of the author's medical profession in such a work. These traces may be of different kinds: 1, The whole character of the narrative may be determined by points of view, aims, and ideals which are more or less medical (disease and its treatment); 2, marked preference may be shown for stories concerning the healing of diseases, which stories may be given in great number and detail; 3, the language may be colored by the language of physicians (medical technical terms, metaphors of medical character, etc.). All these three groups of characteristic signs are found, as we shall see, in the historical work which bears the name of St. Luke. Here, however, it may be objected that the subject matter itself is responsible for these traits, so that their evidence is not decisive for the medical calling of the author. Jesus appeared as a great physician and healer. All the evangelists say this of Him; hence it is not surprising that one of them has set this phase of His ministry in the foreground, and has regarded it as the most important. Our evangelist need not therefore have been a physician, especially if he were a Greek, seeing that in those days Greeks with religious interests were disposed to regard religion mainly under the category of healing and salvation. This is true, yet such a combination of characteristic signs will compel us to believe that the author was a physician if, 4, the description of the particular cases of disease shows distinct traces of medical diagnosis and scientific knowledge; 5, if the language, even where questions of medicine or of healing are not touched upon, is colored by medical phraseology; and, 6, if in those passages where the author speaks as an eyewitness medical traits are especially and prominently apparent. These three kinds of tokens are also found in the historical work of our author. It is accordingly proved that it proceeds from the pen of a physician.

The importance of the concession that Luke was a physician should be properly appreciated. His whole gospel is written from that standpoint. For him the Saviour was the healer, the good physician who went about curing the ills of the body, while ministering to people's souls. He has more accounts of miracles of healing than any of the other Evangelists. He has taken certain of the stories of the other Evangelists who were eye-witnesses, and when they were told in naïve and popular language that obscured the real condition that was present, he has retold the story from the physician's standpoint, and thus the miracle becomes clearer than ever. In one case, where Mark has a slur on physicians, Luke eliminates it. In a number of cases the correction of Mark's popular language in the description of ailments is made in terms that could not have been used except by one thoroughly versed in the Greek medical terminology of the times. As a matter of fact, there seems to be no doubt now that Luke had been, before he became an Evangelist, a practising physician in Malta of considerable experience. His testimony, then, to the miracles is particularly valuable as almost a medical eye-witness.

In medical science, St. Luke's time was by no means barren of knowledge. The Alexandrian school of medicine had done some fine work in its time. It was the first university medical school in the world's history, and there dissection was first practised regularly and publicly for the sake of anatomy, and even the vivisection of criminals who were supplied by the Ptolemei for human physiology, was a part of the school curriculum. A number of important discoveries in brain anatomy are attributed to Herophilus, after whom the torcular herophili within the skull is named, and who invented the term calamus scriptorius for certain ap

pearances in the fourth ventricle. His colleague, Erasistratus, the co-founder of this school at Alexandria, did work in pathological anatomy, and laid the foundation for serious study there. For three centuries there is some good worker, at or in connection with Alexandria, whose name is preserved for us in the history of medicine. Other Greek schools of medicine in the East, as, for instance, that of Pergamos, also did excellent work. Galen is the great representative of this school, and he came in the century after St. Luke. A physician educated in Greek medicine at that time, then, would be in an excellent position to judge critically of the miracles of healing of the Christ, and it would seem to have been providential that Luke was called for this purpose.

The evidence for his membership of our profession will doubtless be interesting to all physicians. Some of the distinctive passages in which Luke's familiarity with medical terms to such an extent that to express his meaning he found himself compelled to use them, will appeal at once to these, for whom such terms are part of everyday speech. The use of the word hydropikos, which is not to be met with anywhere else in the New Testament, nor in the non-medical Greek literature of that time, though the word is of frequent occurrence as a designation for a person suffering from dropsy (and always, as in Luke, the adjective for the substantive), in Hippocrates, Dioscorides, and Galen is a typical example.

Where such vague terms as paralyzed occur Luke does not use the familiar word, but the medical term that meant stricken with paralysis, indicating not any inability to use the limbs, but such a one as was due to a stroke of apoplexy. We who, as physicians, have heard of so many cures of paralysis from our friends, the Eddyites, are prone

to ask, as the first question, what sort of a paralysis it was. Luke made inquiries from men who were eye-witnesses, and then has described the scene with such details as convinced him as a physician of the reality of the miracle, and his description was meant to carry conviction to the minds of others.

Occasionally St. Luke uses words which only a physician would be likely to know at all. That is to say, even a man reasonably familiar with medical terminology and medical literature would not be likely to know them unless he had been technically trained. One of these is the word sphudron, a word which is only medical, and is not to be found even in such large Greek lexicons of ordinary words as that of Passow. Sphudron is the anatomical term of the Græco-Alexandrian school for the condyles of the femur. Galen and other medical authors use it, and Luke, in giving the details of the story of the lame man cured, in the third chapter of the Acts, seventh verse, selects it because it exactly expresses the meaning he wished to convey. In this story there are a number of added medical details. These are all evidently arranged so as to give the full medical significance to the miracle. For instance, the man had been lame from birth, literally from the womb of his mother. At this time he was forty years of age, an age at which the spontaneous cure of such an ailment or, indeed, any cure of it, could scarcely be expected, if, during the preceding time, there had been no improvement.

In the story of the cure of Saul's blindness Luke says in the Acts that his blindness fell from him like scales. The figure is a typically medical one. The word for fall that is used is, as was pointed out by Hobart (" Medical Language of St. Luke," Dublin, 1882), exactly the term that is used for the falling of scales from the body. The term for scales is the specific designation of the particles that fall

from the body during certain skin diseases or after certain of the infectious fevers, as in scarlet fever. Hippocrates and Galen have used it in many places. It is distinctively a medical word. In the story of the vision of St. Peter, told also in the Acts, the word ecstasis, from which we derive our word ecstasy, is used. This is the only word St. Luke uses for vision and he alone uses it. This term is of constant employment in a technical sense in the medical writers of St. Luke's time and before it. When the other evangelists talk of lame people they use the popular term. This might mean anything or nothing for a physician. Luke uses one of the terms that is employed by physicians when they wish to indicate that for some definite reason there is inability to walk.

In the story of the Good Samaritan there are some interesting details that indicate medical interest on the part of the writer. It is Luke's characteristic story and a typical medical instance. He employs certain words in it that are used only by medical writers. The use of oil and wine in the treatment of the wounds of the stranger traveller was at one time said to indicate that it could not have been a physician who wrote the story, since the ancients used oil for external applications in such cases but not wine. More careful search of the old masters of medicine, however, has shown that they used oil and wine not only internally but externally. Hippocrates, for instance, has a number of recommendations of this combination for wounds. It is rather interesting to realize this, and especially the wine in addition to the oil, because wine contains enough alcohol to be rather satisfactorily antiseptic. There seems no doubt that wounds that had been bathed in wine and then had oil poured over them would be likely to do better than those which were treated in other ways. The wine would cleanse and