Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/45

 THE HIPPOCRATICS of medicine to trace the true causes, as well as the probable course, of a disease; and so learn to prevent or, if not that, to control and cure. Outside of Greece, as in Egypt or Baby- lonia, physicians could not cease to be priests or astrologers. There was surgery and some medicine practiced in those lands; but the practice could not quite disregard supposed demoniacal causes of disease or detach itself from the panacea of magic. These supersti- tions were stumbling blocks before the advance of medicine as a science or an art, progressing through knowledge and skill drawn from ob- servation and experience. Their complete elim-. ination first comes before us in the Hippo-! cratic writings. It was part of the Greek freeing of the human spirit from foolish anxieties and irrelevant considerations; a put- ting things in their right places, — their right categories, human and divine, natural and supernatural, if the latter existed at all. In- deed the superhuman and divine might be just the other side, another aspect of the human and material, — just as much part of the uni- versal order and just as subject to law. The classic Hippocratic argument for this principle is in the tract On the Sacred Disease, [23]