Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/168

 NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY Auspices of the Sydenham Society, London, 1849, and New York, 1886. These writings vary in wisdom and knowledge, and not all of them seem to emanate from the same school. Hippocrates was of an Asclepiad family, and bom on the island of Cos, where a temple school of medicine already flourished. He is the supreme representative of the Coan school. The doctrines of the rival school of Cnidus were disapproved by him, yet will be found to have crept into some of the writings included in the Hippocratic Corpus. The Cnidian school was a little earlier than the Coan, and admirable in its practice. Unfortunately for us, and for its own repute, the Cnidian writings are lost. Plato's irony has ruined the Sophists, and the slurs of the Church Fathers on such of their opponents as the Gnostics can- not be repelled by men whom time has rendered voiceless. We wish that the Cnidians also could speak for themselves. 7. The short piece Ilepi Texfr} — Concerning [the] Art [of healing], in the sixth volume of Littre's edition, argues that there is a real medicine or healing art, which, for example (§ 11), enables the physician to infer from other symptoms what is not visible to the eye in internal disease. 8. Heidel's translation, o.c. 9. The writer of the tract has not in mind those working hypotheses or pre-suppositions, which every man of science uses in systematic observation and experiment; he is thinking of the hypotheses which would ascribe all disease to an excess of warmth or cold, dryness or moisture; for this does not tally with common experience. 10. Water, unmixed with wine, was not highly thought of in ancient Greece. 11. On Ancient Medicine, § 13, Adams' translation, o.c, slightly modified. 12. Heidel's translation, o.c. (a very little changed). 13. Adams' Translation, o.c. 14. The attention of Hippocrates and his school was fastened upon acute diseases; chronic affections were re- garded as a result of them. 15. Adams' Translation, o.c. 16. Says Charles Singer, after citing some of these [146]