Aug. 17, 1888.] 



SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 



163 



opening of the " Novum Organum,"* which ascribes to 

 man as the " minister (or servant) and interpreter of 

 Nature " only so much either of power or of knowledge 

 as he has gained by observing the order of nature, 

 outside of which he neither knows nor can do any- 

 thing. Now, it is a curious fact, which has not 

 escaped the editors of Bacon in recent times,t but which 

 may require, nevertheless, to be brought to your notice, 

 that the very word or phrase here used to desig- 

 nate the limitations imposed upon the power of man 

 in reference to Nature is the one which, in a very 

 remote age, had suggested itself to Hippocrates as 

 specially indicating the function of the healer. He is, he 

 must be (according to Hippocrates), " the servant of 

 Nature " — vinjpeTiji 0iWiu?. Nor is this a mere accidental 

 expression, which might be passed over as a coincidence 

 not extending below the surface. On the contrary, the 

 expression is taken up and specially commended by 

 Galen (surely the best of all authorities on such a point) 

 as being of the very essence — the key-note, as it were — 

 of the Hippocratic teaching, with which all the later 

 authorities (Aristotle and the Peripatetics), as he tells us, 

 were essentially in accord. 



But to return to Hippocrates and his remarkable decla- 

 ration, that the /o't/jo?, or healer, is the servant of Nature 

 (0iW). This expression, as I have already said, is no 

 merely casual one in the writings of Hippocrates ; for 

 Galen remarks upon it, and (in the full knowledge, 

 therefore, of all that could be said for or against the ex- 

 pression by rival sectaries) he does not hesitate to de- 

 clare that Hippocrates was " the first to observe the 

 works of Nature : " and that he " is always ad- 

 miring and insisting upon the sufficiency of Nature, 

 whereby what is necessary for the life of all ani- 

 mals is done driicSciKTos — that is, spontaneously, and 

 without apparently conscious effort." He thus places 

 Hippocrates distinctly in advance of, if not above, Aris- 

 totle and the Peripatetics, in respect of originality in the 

 study of0i',j!s; and he further maintains that Erasis- 

 tratus, the Alexandrian anatomist, had adopted an in- 

 consistent attitude towards Nature, and that his followers 

 had exposed themselves to ridicule by their unintelligent 

 criticism on what was simply a development by the Peri- 

 retics of the physiology — that is, Nature-teaching — of 

 Hippocrates. It is not necessary to go into this old con- 

 troversy now further than to show that, by the very fact 

 of its having become a controversy at all, the posi- 

 tion of the icnpo?, or healer, as the " servant of 

 Nature," must have been very well known not only 

 to Galen, but probably also to Aristotle : and through these 

 to the Arabian physicians and to the whole of the middle 

 ages, of which they were the teachers and lawgivers. 



Nor did Hippocrates, the father of medicine, escape 

 the reproach which it has been so easy and so profitable 

 in many ways to fling at those who, in a later day, have 

 proceeded in accordance with his precept, if not his 

 example. We hear chiefly from Pliny and Ceelius 

 Aurelianus of a certain Asclepiades of Bithynia, a con- 

 temporary of Cicero, whose true character it seems 

 rather difficult to decipher, but who at least may be 

 said to have been a fashionable physician in Rome, with 

 a brand-new system of his own. Asclepiades, whose 



* " Homo, Natune minister et interpres, tantum facit et intelligit 

 quantum de Nature ordine re vel mente observaverit, nee amplius 

 scit aut potest." — Aph. i. 



t See note at p. 157 of Ellis and Spedding's edition of Lord 

 Bacon's works, vol.i., 1870. 



role in the treatment of disease seems to have been one 

 of constant interference, or, as we should say, of meddle- 

 some physic, only (it is believed) using as a rule and in 

 a temporising kind of way, the mildest and most agree- 

 able of medicines,* had, of course, no appreciation at all 

 of anyone who, in his character of a healer, professed to 

 be a " servant of Nature." He said, in fact, that, in 

 speaking of nature as a kind of intelligent principle, 

 Hippocrates was (not to put too fine a point upon it) talk- 

 ing nonsense. Nature is too often bent, not upon heal- 

 ing the man, but (as a witty member of this Association 

 once said in my hearing) on putting him into his coffin ! 

 Hippocrates, as the servant of Nature, is simply a waiter 

 upon death (Ouvinov fieXertjv). The true business of a 

 physician is to " make himself master of the occasion " 

 — that is, to shove old Dame Nature out of the way, 

 perform the cure tu/o, cito, et jucunde, and claim all the 

 credit, which, no doubt, he did in Rome, as the quacks 

 in all ages have done everywhere, with great comfort 

 and advantage to himself, and (let us hope) with the 

 minimum of injury to his patients. 



The truth and the falsehood that underlie this old- 

 world argument I will not attempt to discuss this even- 

 ing, having done so already on more than one occasion. 

 I am alluding to it now mainly to show that the posi- 

 tion of him whom we now call the physician, in refer- 

 ence to </Ji'<Tis, was a well-recognised one long before 

 the origin of the term physicus, as applied to him in 

 the Latin of the Middle Ages and the French of the 

 thirteenth century — from which, in all probability, 

 we have derived our English word. What I have now 

 to do is to inquire how far we are maintaining, in this 

 nineteenth century of ours, the position assigned to 

 Hippocrates by Galen (and, I have no doubt, lightly 

 assigned) of being prominent among the seekers into 

 <t>ioK, or, at all events, capable workers in this field, in 

 accordance with the methods and advances of modern 

 physical science. 



It may be not unimportant for this purpose to remark 

 that, so far as we can judge of him from literature, the 

 physician of the middle ages, though retaining the name, 

 was in a very small degree, if at all, cultivated according 

 to the type. Chaucer's Doctour of Physike, though very 

 far indeed from being a pedant, was assuredly much 

 more of a learned than of a scientific physician. The 

 fate of Roger Bacon in the century before Chaucer was 

 an amply sufficient warning to the good-natured and 

 easy-going doctors of his time that anything like original 

 research into envois was dangerous — nay, liable to be 

 proscribed and punished with imprisonment, perhaps 

 with the faggot, unless it proceeded exactly on the lines 

 of St. Thomas Aquinas, the " angelic doctor." It was 

 very much easier and more comfortable, in every way, to 

 stick to Hippocrates and his " humours," where every- 

 thing was sure and safe ; and to add a little astrology, 

 which at least was permitted, if not encouraged,f and 



* He is reported to have been the inventor of the phra e, " Tuto, 

 cito, et jucunde," as applied to medical treatment in general. But 

 he also employed, according to Pliny, magical remedies to a great 

 extent. (See Le Clerc : Histoire de la Medecine, 2nd partie, 1. 3, 

 cc. 4-7.) 



f Judicial astrology, however, which (according to Naude) was 

 " l'enfant suppose de l'astronomie," was (he says) very properly 

 condemned by the Church, " non point comme suspect de magie, 

 mais comme une science vaine et chimerique, quie stellis ea qua: 

 gerunter in lend conietret ; qui veut penetrer dans nos destinees, et 

 qui par la temerite qu'elle a de vouloir segaler a la Providence, en 

 fouillant dans l'avenir, combat directement la religion." So that 

 Chaucer's Doctour of Physike was, perhaps, a heretic after all ! 



