Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/152

 GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE means of cure, adjusted to the symptoms. The test of validity comes when doctors apply their theories to their patients. If the doctors be intelligent and rationally observant, like the Greeks, clinical, and perhaps too frequently death-bed experience may lead them in time to reject some particular theory of disease and cure. But experience, having overthrown one theory, is likely to lead the doctors to shape another. Thus goes on the alternate conflict and alliance between theory and practice, which makes the intellectual romance of medi- cine. The character and vicissitudes of this romance are affected from century to century, by the intellectual temper of the time, con- structive, for example, or sceptical or eclectic. This conflict is set forth in that inaugural Hippocratic writing entitled. The Ancient Medicine, which argues that the practitioner should have nothing to do with philosophers' theories regarding the universe of things and the nature of man. These theories incidentally find the causes of disease in excessive heat or cold, moisture or drjmess. The practice of medicine needs no such vain and superfluous hypotheses. It is a healing art learned through the rational teaching of cumulative observa- [ 130]