XIII. ] THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE. 329 



generalisations of medicine, as an inductive science, 

 were based. 



In this state, pathology, like all the inductive 

 sciences at their origin, was merely natural history ; 

 it registered the phenomena of disease, classified them, 

 and ventured upon a prognosis, wherever the observa- 

 tion of constant co-existences and sequences suggested 

 a rational expectation of the like recurrence under 

 similar circumstances. 



Further than this it hardly went. In fact, in the 

 then state of knowledge, and in the condition of philo- 

 sophical speculation at that time, neither the causes 

 of the morbid state, nor the rationale of treatment, 

 were likely to be sought for as we seek for them now. 

 The anger of a god was a sufficient reason for the 

 existence of a malady, and a dream ample warranty 

 for therapeutic measures ; that a physical phenomenon 

 must needs have a physical cause was not the implied 

 or expressed axiom that it is to us moderns. 



The great man whose name is inseparately con- 

 nected with the foundation of medicine, Hippocrates, 

 certainly knew very little, indeed practically nothing, 

 of anatomy or physiology ; and he would, probably, 

 have been perplexed, even to imagine the possibility 

 of a connection between the zoological studies of his 

 contemporary Democritus and medicine. Neverthe- 

 less, in so far as he, and those who worked before and 

 after him, in the same spirit, ascertained, as matters 

 of experience, that a wound, or a luxation, or a fever, 

 presented such and such symptoms, and that the 

 return of the patient to health was facilitated by such 



