Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/41

 THE HIPPOCRATICS disturbance display itself only in one spot, general symptoms of illness will follow. It is food that furnishes the material from which these humors, or cardinal fluids, renew them- selves. This conception of the humors and the ejects of their disturbance was the chief pillar of the medical temple for the next two thou- sand years, and became part of the current speech of European peoples. Although not universally accepted in Greek medicine, it received the authoritative approval of Galen and then of Avicenna, the Arabian physician and philosopher of the eleventh century; and no one stood out against them until the pro- digious Paracelsus, than whom no man was ever more vociferously dubbed quack and charlatan by his own as well as later times. Strictly taken, the theory of the four humors was as baseless as Paracelsus said it was; yet the conception of functional coordination among the human organs and of the general disturbance resulting from the sickness of any one of them, has never been discarded. Hip- pocrates viewed the body as a whole and had observed that the sickness of a pa^t m'ght dis- order or sicken the rest. This might be under- [19]