GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 



pelling these men and their successors to go to 

 nature for their facts, and not accept them 

 from authority; and the other was the con- 

 comitant or resulting increase of knowledge 

 of the human body in health and disease, and 

 of other living organisms, as well as of the 

 action of natural agencies affecting them. 



Some of these men were even tempted to 

 depreciate the ancients, drawing a breath of 

 relief after the long incumbency, the dead 

 weight, of their authority. Yet as medicine 

 through the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 

 turies, and to our own day, continued on its 

 chequered and romantic career, ever and anon 

 there came to it the impulse to take refuge in 

 the old Hippocratic wisdom. 



The struggle, nay, the romance of medicine, 

 springs from the desire of the intellectual 

 creature to find a reason, an underlying ex- 

 planation, to " save " and account for observed 

 phenomena. The thoughtful doctor seeks to 

 account for the action of disease, and find an 

 accordant theory, as well as means of cure. 

 His desire to understand disease keeps 

 him from being satisfied with such remedies as 

 mere experience has shown to be followed with 

 good results. 



[128] 



