Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/34



REEK MEDICINE, with surgery, was an art, the healing art,. Through its ministrations men and women, the highest order of living beings, were healed of their wounds or, when sick, restored to health. Such was medicine in its broad Hippocratic foundations, which consciously rested upon still more ancient medical experience. But since the doctors were thinking men and also Greeks, they sought to know the causes of sickness; some of them speculated on the nature of man and invented hypotheses of disease. So medicine inclined to theory, besides relying on the results of observation of the sick; it tended to become a science as well as an art. Members of the healing craft studied anatomy and physiology (in the modern sense), which are biological sciences. Indeed so far as medicine became science as well as art, it falls within the province of biology.

Greek medicine and natural philosophy or