ABSTRACT
Early Greek Medicine.—Of Minoan medicine we know almost nothing1 In the second millennium B.c. the sanitary arrangements of the palace of Cnossos w ere more hygienic than any built down to the eighteenth century of our era. An Egyptian book of medicine gives a formula for exorcising a malady in the Cretan language. The Cretans seem to have known certain drugs, diktame,which had miraculous virtues, asplenum, a remedy for affections of the spleen, and daukos, a fat-reducer. The names of these drugs, which are believed to be in the language spoken by the Minoans, existed in the dialects of Crete in later times. It is conceivable, but not provable, that some memory of Minoan medicine, whatever it may have been, survived, like other elements of culture, in classical Greece.
