GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 



means of cure, adjusted to the symptoms. 

 The test of validity comes when doctors apply 

 their theories to their patients. If the doctors 

 be intelligent and rationally observant, like the 

 Greeks, clinical, and perhaps too frequently 

 death-bed experience may lead them in time 

 to reject some particular theory of disease and 

 cure. But experience, having overthrown one 

 theory, is likely to lead the doctors to shape 

 another. Thus goes on the alternate conflict 

 and alliance between theory and practice, 

 which makes the intellectual romance of medi- 

 cine. The character and vicissitudes of this 

 romance are affected from century to century, 

 by the intellectual temper of the time, con- 

 structive, for example, or sceptical or eclectic. 

 This conflict is set forth in that inaugural 

 Hippocratic writing entitled, The Ancient 

 Medicine, which argues that the practitioner 

 should have nothing to do with philosophers' 

 theories regarding the universe of things and 

 the nature of man. These theories incidentally 

 find the causes of disease in excessive heat or 

 cold, moisture or dryness. The practice of 

 medicine needs no such vain and superfluous 

 hypotheses. It is a healing art learned through 

 the rational teaching of cumulative observa- 

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