Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/49

 THE HIPPOCRATICS this great opening treatise, one will not fail to admire its profound intelligence. So Hippocrates saw the natural causes of disease in such matters as unsuitable food or evil indulgence, unhealthy occupations, climate and the changing seasons. He had also ob- served the effect of heredity and the strength of individual constitutions on their proneness to disease. The office of medicine, of all medi- cal treatment, was to assist the natural re- cuperative powers of the patient to throw off the disease. This Hippocratic idea of nature's vis medicatrix was hardly an hypothesis, so open to observation was the tendency of wounds to heal and of sick people to recover. For treatment Hippocrates relied upon the clinical observation of the course of acute dis- ease and the significance of pathological symptoms, recognized from the contrast ex- hibited with the state of the body in health. Symptoms had always local significance; usually they indicated further physical dis- turbance. Let a comprehensive and whole view be taken of the case, with careful consideration of every indication of the patient's condition and chances of recovery. The symptoms were considered generally as the phenomena of acute ' [27]