Acron

, a celebrated physician of Agrigentum in Sicily, lived, according to Plutarch, at the time of the great plague at Athens in the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, in the eighty-fourth olympiad, or 444 B. C. He is said to have stopped the prpgress of thecontagion by scattering perfumes in the air; but while doubts may be entertained of the efficacy of this practice, it was at least not new, having been tried before his time by the Egyptian priests, according to Suidas. Pliny considers Acron as | the chief of the empirical sect, but that sect were riot known for two hundred years after. Suidas says he wrote a treatise on medicine, and another on food, neither of which is now known. ¹