GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 



ings of rationalized experience into agreement 

 with hypotheses touching the nature and dis- 

 eases of man or the things of heaven and 

 earth. 



Thus the tract opens: "There are those 

 who have essayed to speak or write concerning 

 medicine, basing their argument on the hot or 

 cold, on the moist or the dry or anything else 

 they choose, reducing the causes of human dis- 

 eases and death to a minimum, one and the 

 V same for all, basing their argument on one or 

 two [such causes] ; but in many of the novel- 

 ties they utter they are clearly in the wrong. 

 This is the more blameworthy, because they 

 err touching an actual art which all men em- 

 ploy in the greatest emergencies and in which 

 they honor most the skillful practitioners. 

 Now 'there are practitioners, some bad, some 

 excellent; which would not be true if medicine 

 were not actually an art, and no observations 

 or discoveries had been made in it. All would 

 be equally unskilled and ignorant of it, and 

 the cure of diseases would be wholly subject 

 to chance. As a matter of fact, it is not so; 

 but, as artisans in all other arts excel one the 

 other in handicraft and knowledge, so also in 

 medicine.'^ Therefore I maintained that it had 



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