Illustrations of information furnished by medals, small bronzes, &c. / by F. Parkes Weber.

  • Weber, Frederick Parkes, 1863-1962.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Illustrations of information furnished by medals, small bronzes, &c. / by F. Parkes Weber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    This paper was read at the Seventeenth International Congress of Medicine, London, August 1913. [Tuesday Afternoon, August 12J J2. SECTION XXIII HISTORY OF ME0TCINE INDEPENDENT PAP ILLUSTRATIONS OF INFORMATION BY MEDALS, SMALL BRONZES, &c. By F. PARKES WEBER, M.D., F.R.C.P., F.S.A. I believe that apart from the portrait medals of physicians, surgeons, scientists, &c., the medical interest in numismatics has been overestimated. An appeal to coins and medals, however, frequently confirms or illustrates some already known or surmised detail. Occasionally coins and medals and other old metallic 1 documents ’ furnish the only evidence forth- coming in regard to some point of interest. I have ventured to bring before you to-day a few examples illustrating the kind of, and sometimes scantiness of, information on various subjects to be derived from an appeal to medals, small bronzes, &c. Baron de Witte, in the Memoires de la Soc. des Antiquaires de France for 1869 (vol. xxxi, p. 168), referred to a small votive bronze figure found near Soissons, in the Department Aisne, France. It represented an emaciated man seated on a stool, and bore the dedicatory inscription : EYAAMIAAC TTEPAIK(KOY ANE0HKE) ; and had been already figured by A. de Longperier in the Revue Archeologique for 1844 (Paris, First Series, vol. i, Plate XIII). It was evidently a votive offering dedicated by the man whose name is inscribed on it, who must have been afflicted by some wasting disease. The existence of such a figure, to my mind, undoubtedly throws light on a curious passage in the Description of Greece (Book X, on Phocis, chap. ii. 4) by Pausanias, in the second century a.d., but I find that Baron de Witte in his communi- cation above referred to already recognized and specially drew attention to this. I will quote the passage from J. G. Frazer’s translation of Pausanias’s work (London, 1898, vol. i, p. 501) : ‘ Scarcely, it is said, had he (Phaylus) entered on the command when he saw a vision in a dream, and it was this. Amongst Apollo’s votive offerings (at Delphi) was a bronze effigy of a mouldering corpse, the flesh all wasted away, nothing left but the bones. It was said by theDelphians to be an offering of Hippocrates, the physician. Now in his dream Phaylus thought that he resembled t' A effigy ; and immediately he was attacked by a wasting sickness that fulfilled the