Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/53

 THE HIPPOCRATICS be able to judge from a thorough acquaintance with all the symptoms and a comparison of their weightiness^ not omitting a consideration of the season of the year, yet being sure that at every season bad symptoms prognosticate ill and favorable symptoms good. . . . You should not complain because the name of any disease may not be mentioned here, for you may know all such as come to a crisis in the above mentioned times by the same symp- toms." The Prognosis reflects the spirit and the method of Hippocrates. Its refusal to follow diagnoses into distinctions between diseases which lay beyond any physician's knowl- edge was part of this method and spirit; like- wise its decision to abide by clinical experience of acute disease and the significance of con- stantly occurring S3miptoms. This safer knowl- edge enabled the physician to foresee the course of his patient's sickness, and if possible conduct it to a cure. The salutary conception of a sickness as a chain of phenomena, as a whole, with a past, a present and a future, would keep the physician's healing art from crude empiricism and steady his practice against haphazard remedies. The healing art [31]