Creek Medicine 91 



are no portraits. But the best of them are something much 

 better and more helpful to us than any portrait. They are 

 idealized representations of the kind of man a physician should 

 be and was in the eyes of the best and wisest of the Greeks. 

 (See Fig. i.) 



The method of the Hippocratic writers is that known to-day 

 as the ' inductive '. Without the vast scientific heritage that 

 is in our own hands, with only a comparatively small number 

 of observations drawn from the Coan and neighbouring schools, 

 surrounded by all manner of bizarre oriental religions in which 

 no adequate relation of cause and effect was recognized, and 

 above all constantly urged by the exuberant genius for specula- 

 tion of that Greek people in the midst of whom they lived and 

 whose intellectual temptations they shared, they remain never- 

 theless, for the most part, patient observers of fact, sceptical 

 of the marvellous and the unverifiable, hesitating to theorize 

 beyond the data, yet eager always to generalize from actual 

 experience ; calm, faithful, effective servants of the sick. There 

 is almost no type of mental activity known to us that was not 

 exhibited by the Greeks and cannot be paralleled from their 

 writings; but careful and constant return to verification from 

 experience, expressed in a record of actual observations the 

 habitual method adopted in modern scientific departments is 

 rare among them except in these early medical authors. 



The spirit of their practice cannot be better illustrated than 

 by the words of the so-called ' Hippocratic oath ' : 



' I swear by Apollo the healer, and Asclepius, and Hygieia,and 

 All-heal (Panacea) and all the gods and goddesses . . . that, 

 according to my ability and judgement, I will keep this Oath 

 and this stipulation to reckon him who taught me this Art 

 as dear to me as those who bore me ... to look upon his off- 

 spring as my own brothers, and to teach them this Art, if they 

 would learn it, without fee or stipulation. By precept, lecture, 

 and all other modes of instruction, I will impart a knowledge 



