2 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



relativity and while it may be hard to believe, our present science will 

 probably look quite amateurish to those men and women who follow us. 

 Many important problems in biology remain to be solved and who can 

 say what transformations their solutions will make in our present-day 

 ideas? 



EXCERPTS FROM Nature of Man, Humours, Aphorisms 



and Regmien * 



HIPPOCRATES 

 NATURE OF MAN 



He who is accustomed to hear speakers discuss the nature of man beyond 

 its relations to medicine will not find the present account of any interest. 

 For I do not say at all that a man is air, or fire, or water, or earth, or any- 

 thing else that is not an obvious constituent of a man; such accounts I 

 leave to those who care to give them. Those, however, who give them 

 have not in my opinion correct knowledge. . . . 



Now about these men I have said enough, and I will turn to physicians. 

 Some of them say that a man is blood, others that he is bile, a few that 

 he is phlegm. . . . The body of man has in itself blood, phlegm, yellow 

 bile and black bile; these make up the nature of his body, and through these 

 he feels pain or enjoys health. Now he enjoys the most perfect health 

 when these elements are duly proportioned to one another in respect of 

 compounding, power, bulk, and when they are perfectly mingled. Pain is 

 felt when one of these elements is in defect or excess, or is isolated in the 

 body without being compounded with all the others. For when an ele- 

 ment is isolated and stands by itself, not only must the place where it left 

 become diseased, but the place where it stands in a fiood must, because of 

 the excess, cause pain and distress. In fact when more of an element flows 

 out of the body than is necessary to get rid of superfluity, the emptying 

 causes pain. 



Now I promised to show that what are according to me the constituents 

 of man remain always the same, according to both convention and nature. 

 These constituents are, I hold, phlegm, blood, black bile, and yellow bile. 

 First I assert that the names of these according to convention are separated, 

 and that none of them has the same name as the others; furthermore, that 

 according to nature their essential forms are separated, phlegm being quite 

 unlike blood, blood being quite unlike bile, bile being quite unlike phlegm. 

 How could they be like one another, when their colours appear not alike 



* Reprinted by permission of the publishers from the Loeb Classical Library, Hip- 

 pocrates, Volume IV, translated by W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- 

 versity Press, 1 93 1. 



