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theory and every turn in the current of thought, often very shallow, the influence remains profound. Their language is an unknown tongue to many, at least in so far as the finer shades of meaning or of symmetry of form in their more recondite sense are concerned. The charm of rhythm or the subtlety that goes with rhetorical effect is often lost to us. Thus we might proceed in an attempt to understand why such men have dominated the thoughts of posterity, but our endeavors at analysis are defeated and we are driven to extend the many definitions of genius to a pragmatical conclusion that success in its age-long demonstration is the weightiest factor in our understanding of genius. In this connection, however, that is inclusive of that boast of the old debauchee whom Shakespeare's art has created for us-they are the cause of wit in others.

No remark, preliminary to the study of the writings of Hippocrates, is more helpful than the observation of Littré, who in substance pointed out that while to-day we study disease as an entity and follow the forces of each one from their origin to their post-mortem manifestations, Hippocrates studied man and the reactions he exhibits to his manifold environment. It is the phenomenon presented by man and what it indicates as to the probable result as regards man which he conceived as the chief object of medical study. It requires no very deep reflection to realize that there is a material discrimination to be made psychologically between the concept of disease and the conception of a diseased man. For the former we seek the literature of medicine which has appeared in the last hundred years, for the latter the literature which, originating with Hippocrates, fills the thousands of years which have elapsed since he in his time wrote "On Ancient Medicine." In this essay and in the one following, "On Airs, Waters, and Places," more than in some of his other

treatises, he brings the remote causes of disease and general philosophical conclusions more into prominence. On the other hand, in taking up "The Prognostics" we observe that it is entirely founded on observation. If Hippocrates gathered this experience from the records of clinical observation made by himself and by other priests in the temples of Esculapius, we find that the methods of observation, which served as the basis of a priestly and magical interpretation, served also for the beginnings of rational medicine. How it came about that historians have ascribed to Hippocrates the fame of being the first to question nature would furnish an interesting and instructive example of how Baconians have perverted the plain indications of history. Evidence has shown Babylonian priests taking meticulous care for unnumbered centuries in recording facts and their sequences, phenomena they observed in the heavens and in the entrails of animals and the mundane events, important to man, which followed the observations. They observed and questioned nature, but they did not reason right.

When Ermerins, whom Adams quotes, made the remarks which follow he only partly disclosed the reform wrought in the ranks of the Asclepiada, before the epoch and during the time of Hippocrates, who was their spokesman:

The readers must particularly keep before their eyes this origin and the antiquity of those writings if they would pass a correct judgment on the merits of the Asclepiade towards the art of medicine. Whatever in their works we have the pleasure of possessing, all attest the infancy of the art; many things are imperfect, and not unfrequently do we see them, while in the pursuit of truth, groping, as it were, and proceeding with uncertain steps, like men wandering about in darkness; but yet the method which they applied, and to which they would seem to have betaken themselves of their own accord, was so excellent that nothing could surpass it. It was the same method which Hippocrates himself always adopted, and which,

in fine, Lord Bacon, many ages afterward, commended as the only instrument by which truth in medicine can be found out.

As a matter of fact they inherited their method from the rules of the practice of magic, the observation of the stars, the flight of birds and the entrails of animals. They turned from these observations to observations on the phenomena of disease. They recorded one just as they recorded the other, on the walls of temples and on their tablets. What the Asclepiada really did was to turn away not from habits of the observation of nature, which we cherish, but from irrational methods of thought. They reformed the rules of logic, but they did not introduce the inductive method; it was already hoary with age.

Although Hippocrates Hippocrates criticised the methods of the Nature philosophers he resorted almost as freely as they to theory building. Dr. Ermerins himself basks in the comfort furnished by theories of vital force rampant in his day. The neovitalism of the nineteenth century had its roots deep in human nature, and it still draws its sustenance from that same fundamental mystery which shrouded cosmic laws from the gaze of Babylonian and Baconian alike. The modern man of science must acknowledge its existence, but when he tries to shelter himself from his difficulties in the practical search of truth by a resort to the covert of vitalism he enters the tomb in which the human mind was imprisoned before the era of Thales and of Hippocrates. It was emancipation from this and not the introduction of inductive philosophy, which we owe to Hippocrates and his forbears. The inductive philosophy of Bacon was the basis of the method that primitive man adopted when he began to develop the memory of his cognitions. To judge from the conventional remarks in regard to it one might suppose it had never existed in the world before the time of Lord Bacon, or at least of Hippocrates. Succinctly

stated, this method, which has achieved such an apparent ascendancy in our day, is to proceed from the study of the particular to the general, to collate facts by observation and experiment and from them to deduce the conclusions which are to be applied to the conduct of life and the further investigations of the laws of nature.

In the quotation from the thesis of Dr. Ermerins which Adams has made, it will be noted that Dr. Ermerins commends Hippocrates for being a Baconian. Nothing, perhaps, is more diametrically opposed to the doctrines of Bacon than those of Plato, yet in one of his dialogues we find him claiming Hippocrates' support. Socrates in the "Phædrus" asks if the nature of the soul can be intelligently studied without knowing the nature of the whole and the answer is: "Hippocrates, the Asclepiad, says that this is the only method of procedure by which the nature even of the body can be understood." Hippocrates was the slave of no method. He was the critic and the analyst not only of the problems of nature, but of the methods of men who sought to know them.

If we are to apply the Baconian doctrine rigorously and without the compromise that common sense gives to all things, the student cannot start with certain conclusions of a general character, arrived at by methods of which he must necessarily be ignorant, but he must begin ab initio and build up his foundation from the apperceptions of primitive man to the level of his first entrance into medicine proper, or in a state of entire ignorance he must face a task to which, even in Hippocrates' day, a trained mind stored with the experience of others alone was adequate. Plato had his opinion how best to train that mind and Hippocrates had another, but in the contact noted by Littré their point of agreement, as evident to the most bigoted

2 "The Dialogues of Plato," tr. by B. Jowett. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911. 4 V.

Baconian as to Platonist, lay in the fact that training was as necessary for the beginning of the study of the soul as for the beginning of the study of the body.

The problem of the method of science is at once encountered in the first lines of "On Ancient Medicine":

Whoever, having undertaken to speak or write on ancient medicine have first laid down for themselves some hypothesis to their argument, such as hot or cold or moist or dry, or whatever else they choose, thus reducing their subject within a narrow compass and supposing only one or two original causes of disease or of death among mankind, are all clearly mistaken in much they say.

There seems no reason to doubt the validity of the arguments Littré advances for supposing that the tract on "The Nature of Man" was written by Polybus, the sonin-law of Hippocrates, as Aristotle, almost a contemporary, asserts. In it, however, we get a reversion to the criticism Hippocrates thus visits upon the ancient Nature Philosophers in the opening sentences of his essay "On Ancient Medicine":

According to one, the air is the unique and only thing, to another fire, another water, another earth, and each one sustains his reasoning by evidence and arguments which are of weight. . . . They pretend, indeed, that there is a single substance, arbitrarily chosen and named by each, and that this substance changes its and its nature under the influence appearance of the hot and the cold becoming in a manner soft, bitter, white, black and all the rest.

He will have none of it and advances his own arguments, which partake of those of Alcmæon and the theory of crasis, of equilibrium of the mixtures in the blood, the mucus, the yellow and the black bile in which we find an explanation of the nature of man and what makes the difference between disease and health. He substitutes one theory for another, and in this he sins no more plainly than his father-inlaw, Hippocrates, against the first precepts

of "On Ancient Medicine," in that essay itself and in others.

3

It is difficult to find the origin of the idea of the qualities, the moist, the dry, the hot, and the cold, which after the time of Hippocrates became increasingly more prominent in medical writings until Galen transmitted them through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance to almost our own century. Traces of the formulation of these attributes of matter may be found even in the "Rig Veda." It is therefore of secondary importance to discover whom Hippocrates had in mind as the originator of the theories he attacked. Anaximenes, Parmenides,3 Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, and many other predecessors of Hippocrates doubtless made it a part of their scheme of things, but it originated with none of them. Like the elements of fire, air, earth, and water, like the blood, the breath, and the soul, as a definition of life they belong to the fundamentals in the primitive thought of mankind. These hypotheses, we are to infer from the remarks of Hippocrates and his followers, were to be avoided, but by no means the records of those observations of phenomena whereby the nature of disease had in the past been manifested to others:

For there are practitioners, some bad and some far otherwise, which, if there had been no such thing as medicine, and if nothing had been investigated or found out in it, would not have been the case, but all would have been equally unskilled and ignorant of it, and everything concerning the sick would have been directed by chance.

Then he proceeds to resume his fling at the Nature Philosophers who before him have adopted the hypotheses to which he specifically alludes:

3 "The First Philosophers of Greece," by Arthur Fairbanks. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898.

4 "Early Greek Philosophy," by John Burnet. 2 ed. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1908.

I have not thought that it stood in need of an empty hypothesis, like those subjects which are occult and dubious, in attempting to handle which it is necessary to use some hypothesis; as, for example, with regard to things above us and things below the earth.

Singular to say, the Platonic Socrates rejected them for another reason—not because they were too theoretical, but because they were not theoretical enough, because they were too materialistic, we would say. He remarked to Cebes in the "Phædo " that there was a time when he thought he understood what was what-"the meaning of greater and less pretty well"—but now "I am no longer satisfied that I understand the reason why one or anything else either is generated or destroyed or is at all, but I have in my mind some confused notion of another method, and can never admit this." He had once been much troubled about such matters.

Then I heard some one who had a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, out of which he read that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was quite delighted at the notion of this, which appeared admirable, and I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in the best place; and I argued that if any one desired to find out the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of anything, he must find out what state of being or suffering or doing was best for that thing, and therefore a man had only to consider the best for himself and others, and then he would also know the worse, for that the same science comprised both. And I rejoiced to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes of existence such as I desired, and I imagined that he would tell me first whether the earth is flat or round; and then he would further explain the cause and the necessity of this, and would teach me the nature of the best and show that this was best; and if he said that the earth was in the center, he would explain that this position was the best, and I should be satisfied if this were shown to me, and not want any other sort of cause.

"The Dialogues of Plato," tr. by B. Jowett. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911. 4 v.

I

As he sits there in prison awaiting among his weeping disciples the time for drinking the hemlock, his irony and his humor break forth:

What hopes I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture; that is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off to Megara or Boeotia, by the dog of Egypt they would, if they had been guided only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen as the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, to undergo any punishment which the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking.

suppose reasoning of this kind taken as a model for logic ultimately led to the quips and plays on words and puerilities found in

many of the books of the pre-renaissance period. Here half in jest, half in earnest in the mouth of Socrates, sitting there awaiting death, Plato has put it in a strikingly dramatic setting. It is not ridiculous and pedantic; it is saved from that by the tragedy of the scene, which has indeed become one of the great world tragedies for us. This saving grace of the sublime has preserved for us the grain of truth which lies in much of the chaff of Socrates, which was lost in the maudlin pedantry of monastic philosophy. I do not know whether or not Galen also was jesting, but this Socratic discourse always reminds me of what he says of the recurrent laryngeal nerves to which I have elsewhere drawn attention. At any rate he sets forth the argument also in anatomical terms and ascribes it to the Stoics. If that is so, the Platonic dialogue I have quoted probably is influenced by the same sophism. Galen says the Stoics reasoned thus: "It is evident the voice cometh from the mind. It is also evident it cometh from the larynx. Hence the mind is not in the brain." Galen demolished this sophism thus:

They will wonder when they hear the voice is produced from the brain, and much more after having heard that all voluntary motion is performed by the muscles. . . . For the muscles move certain parts upon which the breathing and the voice depend, and they themselves in their turn are dependent on the nerves from the brain. If you surround any one of these with a ligature, or if you cut it, you will render the muscle to which it is distributed motionless, as well as the limb of the animal which has moved before the nerve was cut.

I take it this is satisfactory to twentieth century materialists, but after all the pigs on whom Galen seems to have experimented have a larynx and recurrent nerves, and however learned they may be at the circus, a four-legged variety do not talk, so I

"History of Laryngology," by Jonathan Wright. 2d ed. revised and enlarged. Philadelphia and New York: Lea & Febiger, 1914.

prefer to believe with Zeno and Socrates that the mind is an organ of the voice, and that Galen's criticism is a confused and presumptuous tampering with logic and dialectics, in which he was practiced but in which he was not an adept. I may have seemed to wander a little from the subject of the method of science, but the matter I have introduced serves to illustrate that it is not sufficient experimentally to cut or stimulate the recurrent laryngeal nerves and to observe the sequence of events; it is necessary to take into view the differences between a man's voice and that of a pig. Those who are familiar with the technical experiences elicited from an experimental study of the laryngeal nerves a generation ago will appreciate the necessity for the erection of some hypothesis looking to this discrimination. The acceptation of theory erected on the experience of others and rationalistic deductions from it are absolutely necessary for progression beyond the possibilities of mental activity open to primitive man.

Littré has included in his edition of the complete works of Hippocrates a little tractate of unknown authorship, "The Precepts." In it we get a glimpse of the opinions of Hippocrates. It is elaborated from the passages we are concerned with in the essay "On Ancient Medicine" or from some of the other genuine books. Perhaps it is from his own hand. I think the sentiments there expressed perhaps are a nearer approach to the method of Hippocrates than the Baconian which has been foisted on him by the distorted vision of more recent admirers. He who knows that in time occurs the opportunity and in the opportunity a brief time:

In order to practice medicine, should devote himself not at first to the probability of reasoning, but to reasoned experience. Reasoning is a sort of synthesis of all that has been perceived by the senses. . . . I praise, therefore, all the reasoning faculty, if it takes its departure from

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