MEDICAL THEORY AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE ZEITGEIST.

Philosophies are really waking dreams, and their thought-forms are to be explained largely on the principles of dream interpretation. The article tries to show how the prevailing spirit of the age, the Zeitgeist, tends ever to run parallel in social and medical theory. Ancient Greece was not a country in the modern sense, it was a lot of little communities scattered about the eastern Mediterranean and united by trade, by racial kinship, by a common language and civilization. When Greece was at her best, she was not a political unity at all, political centralization first followed the need for repelling the Persians; later, under Alexander III, it signified nothing but the Greeks' loss of freedom. During the golden age of Greece, the unit of community life was the city-state or polis. The polis was the actual locality in which the Greek resided, worked, and spent his daily life, all citizens took part in the daily life of their town or district. The polis, in fact, had not yet become a metropolis.