Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/150

 GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE pelling these men and their successors to go to nature for their facts, and not accept them from authority; and the other was the con- comitant or resulting increase of knowledge of the human body in health and disease, and of other living organisms, as well as of the action of natural agencies affecting them. Some of these men were even tempted to depreciate the ancients, drawing a breath of relief after the long incumbency, the dead weight, of their authority. Yet as medicine through the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies, and to our own day, continued on its chequered and romantic career, ever and anon there came to it the impulse to take refuge in the old Hippocratic wisdom. The struggle, nay, the romance of medicine, springs from the desire of the intellectual creature to find a reason, an underlying ex- planation, to " save " and account for observed phenomena. The thoughtful doctor seeks to account for the action of disease, and find an accordant theory, as well as means of cure. His desire to understand disease keeps him from being satisfied with such remedies as mere experience has shown to be followed with good results. [128]