228 TRANSLATIONS FROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
power and the providential wisdom of Nature. The day on 
which the morbid matter arrived at the period of coction 
became the critical day. The quarternary period, or four 
days, was considered the most perfect: then came the ter¬ 
nary, or three days, while the addition of these two periods 
formed the septennary, or seven days, which was considered 
the most perfect. Aristotle, the chief of the peripatetic 
school, gave a fresh impulse to the science of observation, 
and an impression, which has never been effaced, by his 
famous axiom, that all ideas are derived from the senses. He 
showed the necessity of gathering the facts before submitting 
to theory, thus uniting the example to the precept. During 
the space of 2000 years the name of Aristotle has been as if 
surrounded by a divine halo, and to this day his precepts in 
matter of observation have lost nothing. The philosophy 
of sensations, or empiricism, of which Aristotle laid the 
foundation, flourished in a celebrated school at the most 
brilliant epoch of the human history; but the school of phi¬ 
losophy of Alexandria had its day, and medicine shared 
the fate of philosophy. The reformers upset the exist¬ 
ing system, and reconstituted the art with new elements. 
It took the name of empiricism, and from this was de¬ 
rived the sceptic philosophy. The empiric school, con¬ 
sidered as the unique source of medical knowledge, excluded 
all theoretical reasoning. Celsus took up this reasoning of 
the precept of empiricism in the following phrase: u Morbis 
non verbis, sed medicamentis sanare. Non interesse quid 
morbum faciat, sed quid tollatA The last representative 
of ancient medicine was the illustrious Galen, the most 
renowned amongst the eclectics. His mind was of a cri¬ 
tical turn, conjoined with vast erudition ; he united all the 
doctrines of his predecessors into one nosological system. 
His general pathology is distinguished by accurate and pre¬ 
cise definitions ; it developes ideas, some of which have been 
preserved to the present day; he defines health as the regu¬ 
larity of all the vital functions, the indispensable condition 
of which is the integrity of the structure of the parts, and 
the exact proportion of the solids and liquids. These 
conditions are not better expressed by modern authors. 
Malady was defined by him as the opposite of health ; it 
was an abnormal state owing to an altered structure, which 
in its turn altered the function. The moderns have bor¬ 
rowed this definition of Galen without perceiving that it 
contained an error. . Disease is not a state , but an act. 
Christianity introduced a new state of civilization, but it 
had to sustain many struggles, both moral and material. 
