137, Bywater's no.

LVIII.
The South Italian nature philosophers contributed much more to the science of medicine, and in certain of the colonial towns there were medical schools as early as the fifth century B.C.The most famous of these physician philosophers was Pythagoras, whose life and work had an extraordinary influence upon medicine, particularly in connection with his theory of numbers, and the importance of critical days.

His discovery of the dependence of the pitch of sound on the length of the vibrating chord is one of the most fundamental in acoustics.

Among the members of the school which he founded at Crotona were many physicians.
who carried his views far and wide throughout Magna Graecia.

Nothing in his teaching dominated medicine so much as the doctrine of numbers, the sacredness of which seems to have had an enduring fascination for the medical mind.