Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/119

 *berg, of Max Neuburger, and of Pagel, as well as the sections devoted to these subjects in the French (Littré) and the German (Fuchs) versions of the Hippocratic writings. At every step in such a study, the modern physician will encounter ideas and individual terms which he will have great difficulty in comprehending; and later on, as he reads the sections which deal with the more practical matters of the medical art, he will be astonished to find that Hippocrates was a most acute and trustworthy observer of the phenomena of disease, a remarkably clear writer, and a standard-bearer of very high aims.

In the examination and treatment of the sick the physicians of ancient Greece were highly trained. They paid very close attention to the patient's account of his symptoms, but it was to the physical examination of the diseased body that they attached the greatest importance. They noted with extreme care the color and other peculiarities of the skin and mucous membranes, the condition of the abdomen, and the shape and movements of the thorax; they tested the patient's temperature by placing the hand upon the body; and all the excretions were subjected to the closest scrutiny. By means of palpation they were able to determine not only the size of the liver and spleen, but also the changes which occur in the form of these organs in the course of certain diseases. They utilized succussion both as an aid to diagnosis and as a means of favoring the breaking through of pus into the bronchial tubes. They were familiar with the pleuritic friction sound and with the finest râles, which they compared to the creaking of leather or "the noise of boiling vinegar." In their descriptions of these sounds it is distinctly stated that the examiner's ear was kept tightly pressed against the patient's chest.

In speaking of the accounts of individual diseases which appear in the Hippocratic writings, Puschmann says that they are evidently based on cases actually observed in practice, and that they are admirably written. It is in the laws which they have laid down with regard to the treatment of disease, however, that the Hippocratic writers have