THE HIPPOCRATICS 



disturbance display itself only in one spot, 

 general symptoms of illness will follow. It is 

 food that furnishes the material from which 

 these humors, or cardinal fluids, renew them- 

 selves. 



This conception of the humors and the 

 effects of their disturbance was the chief pillar 

 of the medical temple for the next two thou- 

 sand years, and became part of the current 

 speech of European peoples. Although not 

 universally accepted in Greek medicine, it 

 received the authoritative approval of Galen 

 and then of Avicenna, the Arabian physician 

 and philosopher of the eleventh century; and 

 no one stood out against them until the pro- 

 digious Paracelsus, than whom no man was ever 

 more vociferously dubbed quack and charlatan 

 by his own as well as later times. 



Strictly taken, the theory of the four humors 

 was as baseless as Paracelsus said it was; yet 

 the conception of functional coordination 

 among the human organs and of the general 

 disturbance resulting from the sickness of any 

 one of them, has never been discarded. Hip- * 

 pocrates viewed the body. as a whole and had 

 observed that the sickness of a pa r t might dis- 

 order or sicken the rest. This might be under- 



[19] 



