ANCIENT IRISH MEDICINE 
not according to the amount of labor or effort in- 
volved in his service—which is the standard of 
wages for the manual laborer—but according to 
the value of that service to his patient or his client. 
In Babylonia as in Ireland, though the two coun- 
tries were separated by all the breadth of Europe 
and some of Asia, and the customs were separated 
by over 2,000 years, this thoroughgoing professional 
spirit obtained. The scale of fees was very nearly 
the same. For curing a relative of the royal family, 
a prince or a wealthy merchant, the physician in 
Babylonia was justified in charging about the equiva- 
lent of a year’s wages to a working man; for healing 
a slave the charge could be only one-fifth or one-sixth 
that amount. Curiously enough in Babylonia too 
they were rather hard on quacks and charlatans and 
the physician was kept to his promise of healing. 
The Brehon (Irish) laws are very interesting 
especially for us in the modern time in their exact 
distinction between the “lawful” and the “unlawful” 
physician. We might secure hints for the regula- 
tion and practice of medicine in our day when there 
are so many abuses due to the irregular practitioner 
of medicine from the old Irish laws. For instance 
the law declared: 
“If an unlawful physician treat a joint or sinew 
without obtaining an indemnity against liability to 
damages and with a notice to the patient that he is 
not a regular physician, he is subject to a penalty 
with compensation to the patient.” 
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