Domain of Physiology. 239 



rently synonymous with naturiste, which, as stated by the 

 learned Littre in his Dictionnaire, meant " a mediciner who 

 practised expectant medicine — that is to say, who trusted to 

 the conservative influences of nature to heal his patient." 



§ 11. For the origin of the physician or naturian in medi- 

 cine, we must go back more than twenty centuries, to the great 

 Hippocrates, justly styled the father of medicine. It was a 

 maxim of his school that " nature is the healer of diseases "* ; 

 and himself it was who wrote of medicine, that " the art con- 

 sists in three things — the malady, the patient, and the medi- 

 ciner. The mediciner is the servant of nature, and the patient 

 must help the mediciner to combat the disease "f. 



Nature, in the language of the time, was spoken of as a vis 

 medicatrix, or healing power ; but Yirchow justly remarks 

 that, from a careful perusal of the works left us by the great 

 master, we cannot doubt that by nature he meant the whole 

 bodily constitution of man. Hippocrates insisted upon a treat- 

 ment of diseases based not upon magic nor upon supernatural 

 agencies, but upon the belief that nature works according to 

 a divine necessity ; in other words, he taught a system of pa- 

 thology founded on the recognition of physical laws, which ho 

 opposed to the superstitious notions of his caste and his age. 

 The iatros, or mediciner, was henceforth no longer a magician, 

 nor a priest, but a physiologist, physician, or naturist, seeking 

 for healing agencies in the study of the physical organization 

 of the patient. The pathology of the Dogmatists, who were 

 . the disciples of Hippocrates, was based upon a knowledge of 

 the structure and functions of the human organism, and of the 

 structural and functional modifications produced alike by 

 disease and by the action of drugs. 



§ 12. But Hippocrates had still another claim to the title 

 of physician or physiologist, since, not content with studying 

 the physical constitution of man, he insisted upon the import- 

 ance of a knowledge of all his relations to external nature. In 

 his celebrated treatise 'On Airs, Waters, and Localities,' Hip- 

 pocrates declares that whoever would understand medicine, 

 must study the movements of the heavenly bodies and all 

 meteorological phenomena, together with physical geography, 



* Noiio-wi/ (jivaces Irjrpol, Hippocrates, Epidem. book vi. sec. 5. 1. 



t Ejridem. book i., sec. 2, 5. The received text makes the mediciner 

 " the servant of the art ; " but Galen, in his ' Commentary/ tells ns that 

 some manuscripts in his time had, instead of 6 Irjrpos vnrjpeTrjs rrjs rexvys, 

 the word cfavo-ios for rex^rjs. This latter reading I have followed, as 

 more consonant with the previously cited dictum ; for if " nature is the 

 healer of diseases," the mediciner must be u the servant of nature." See 

 Adams's ' Genuine Works of Hippocrates,' vol. i. p. 800, note ; also Littre's 

 ' Hippocrates,' vol. ii. in loco. 



