In this one memorable paragraph, so condensed in the original as to be almost untranslatable, he who ‘first separated medicine from philosophy’ puts aside at once all speculative interest while in the actual presence of the sick. His whole energy is concentrated on the case in hand with that peculiar attitude, at once impersonal and intensely personal, that has since been the mark of the physician, and that has made of Medicine both a science and an art.
‘For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure.’[125]
‘The aged endure fasting most easily; next adults; next young persons, and least of all children, and especially such as are the most lively.’
‘Growing bodies have the most innate heat; they therefore require the most nourishment, and if they have it not they waste. In the aged there is little heat, and therefore they require little fuel, for it would be extinguished by much. Similarly fevers in the aged are not so acute, because their bodies are cold.’
‘In disease sleep that is laborious is a deadly symptom; but if sleep relieves it is not deadly.’
‘Sleep that puts an end to delirium is a good symptom.’
‘If a convalescent eats well, but does not put on flesh, it is a bad symptom.’
‘Food or drink which is a little less good but more palatable, is to be preferred to such that is better but less palatable.’
‘The old have generally fewer complaints than young; but those chronic diseases which do befall them generally never leave them.’
Here we have a group of observations, some of which have become literally household words, nor is it difficult to understand how such sayings have passed from professional into lay keeping. This magnificent book of Aphorisms was very early translated into Latin, probably before and certainly not later than the sixth century of the Christian era, and thus became accessible throughout the West. Manuscripts of this Latin version, dating from the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, have survived in the actual places in which they were written, at Monte Cassino in Southern Italy and at Einsiedeln in Switzerland, and in 991 the book of Aphorisms was well known and closely studied at the Cathedral school of Chartres. From France the Aphorisms reached England, and they are mentioned in documents of the tenth or eleventh century. By now, too, the book had been translated into Syriac and later into Arabic and Hebrew, so that in the true mediaeval period it was known both East and West, and in the vernacular as well as the classical tongues. From the oriental dialects several further translations were again made into Latin. An enormous number of manuscripts of the work have survived in almost every Western dialect, and these show on the whole that the text has been surprisingly little tampered with. In the middle of the thirteenth century some of the better-known Aphorisms were absorbed into a very popular Latin poem that went forth in the name of the medical school of Salerno, though with a false ascription to a yet earlier date. The Salernitan poem, being itself translated into every European vernacular, further helped to bring Hippocrates into every home.