98 Greek Medicine 



was a mere hypothesis, as the Hippocratists themselves well 

 knew. There were other more remote causes which came into 

 the actual purview of the physician, conditions which he could 

 and did study. Such conditions were, for instance, injudicious 

 modes of life, exposure to climatic changes, advancing age, and 

 the like. Many of these could be directly corrected. But for 

 those that could not there were various therapeutic measures 

 at hand. 



That human bodies are and normally remain in a state of 

 health, and that on the whole they tend to recover from disease, 

 is an attitude so familiar to us to-day that we scarcely need to 

 be reminded of it. We live some twenty-three centuries later 

 than Hippocrates ; for some sixteen of those centuries the 

 civilized world thought that to retain health periodical bleed- 

 ings and potions were necessary ; for the last century or 

 two we have been gradually returning on the Hippocratic 

 position ! 



The chief glory of the Hippocratic collection regarded from the 

 clinical point of view is perhaps the actual description of cases. A 

 number of these forty-two in all have survived. 1 They are not 

 only unique as a collection for nearly 2,000 years, but they are 

 still to this day models of what succinct clinical records should 

 be, clear and short, without a superfluous word, yet with all 

 that is most essential, and exhibiting merely a desire to record 

 the most important facts without the least attempt to prejudge 

 the case. They illustrate to the full the Greek genius for seizing 

 on the essential. The writer shows not the least wish to exalt 

 his own skill. He seeks merely to put the data before the reader 

 for his guidance under like circumstances. It is a reflex of the 

 spirit of full honesty in which these men lived and worked that 

 the great majority of the cases are recorded to have died. Two 

 of this remarkable little collection may be given : 



1 They are to be found as an Appendix to Books I and III of the Epidemics 

 and embedded in Book III. 



