Greek Medicine in 



No less remarkable is the following saying : * In jaundice 

 it is a grave matter if the liver becomes indurated.' Jaundice 

 is a common and comparatively trivial symptom following or 

 accompanying a large variety of diseases. In and by itself it is of 

 little importance and almost always disappears spontaneously. 

 There is a small group of pathological conditions, however, 

 in which this is not the case. The commonest and most 

 important of these are the fatal affections of cirrhosis and 

 cancer of the liver in which that organ may be felt to be 

 enlarged and hardened. If therefore the liver can be so felt 

 in a case of jaundice, it is, as the Aphorism says, of gravest 

 import. Representations of such cases have actually come down 

 to us from Greek times. Thus on a monument erected at Athens 

 to the memory of a physician who died in the second century 

 of the Christian era we may see the process of clinical 

 examination (fig. 7). The physician is palpating the liver of 

 a dwarfish figure whose swollen belly, wasted limbs, and 

 anxious look tell of some such condition as that described in 

 the Aphorism. The ridge caused by the enlarged liver can even 

 be detected on the statue. 



' We must attend to the appearances of the eyes in sleep as 

 presented from below ; for if a portion of the white be seen 

 between the closing eyelids, and if this be not connected with 

 diarrhoea or severe purging, it is a very bad and mortal 

 symptom.' In this, the last Aphorism which we shall quote, we 

 see the Hippocratic physician actually making his observations. 

 Now during sleep the eyeball is turned upward, so that if the 

 eye be then opened and examined only the white is seen. In 

 the later stages of all wasting and chronic diseases the eyelids 

 tend not to be closed during sleep. Such patients, as is well 

 known, often die with the eyes open and sometimes exhibiting 

 only the whites. 



But the Hippocratic physician was not content to make only 

 passive observation ; he also took active measures to elicit 



