In Dr. Adams’ Life of Hippocrates,[395] he says: “In surgery he was a bold operator. He fearlessly, and as we would now think, in some cases unnecessarily, perforated the skull with the trepan and the trephine in injuries of the head. He opened the chest also in empyema and hydrothorax. His extensive practice, and no doubt his great familiarity with the accidents occurring at the public games of his country, must have furnished him with ample opportunities of becoming acquainted with dislocations and fractures of all kinds; and how well he had profited by the opportunities which he thus enjoyed, every page of his treatises On Fractures and On the Articulations abundantly testifies. In fact, until within a very recent period, the modern plan of treatment in such cases was not at all to be compared with his skilful mode of adjusting fractured bones, and of securing them with waxed bandages. In particular, his description of the accidents which occur at the elbow and hip-joints will be allowed, even at the present day, to display a most wonderful acquaintance with the subject. In the treatment of dislocations, when human strength was not sufficient to restore the displacement, he skilfully availed himself of all the mechanical powers which were then known. In his views with regard to the nature of club-foot, it might have been affirmed of him a few years ago that he was twenty-four centuries in advance of his profession, when he stated that in this case there is no dislocation, but merely a declination of the foot; and that in infancy, by means of methodical bandaging, a cure may in most cases be effected without any surgical operation. In a word, until the days of Delpech and Stromeyer, no one entertained ideas so sound and scientific on the nature of this deformity as Hippocrates.”
Dr. Adams, recapitulating the general results of the investigations as to the genuineness of the Hippocratic books, states that a considerable portion of them are not the work of Hippocrates himself. The works almost universally admitted to be genuine are: The Prognostics, On Airs, etc., On Regimen in Acute Diseases, seven of the books of Aphorisms, Epidemics, I. and III., On the Articulations, On Fractures, On the Instruments of Reduction, The Oath.
The following are almost certainly genuine: On Ancient Medicine, On the Surgery, The Law, On Ulcers, On Fistulæ, On Hæmorrhoids, On the Sacred Disease.[396]
The Law.
1. Medicine is of all the arts the most noble; but owing to the ignorance of those who practise it, and of those who, inconsiderately, form a judgment of them, it is at present far behind all the other arts. Their mistake appears to me to arise principally from this, that in the cities there is no punishment connected with the practice of medicine (and with it alone) except disgrace, and that does not hurt those who are familiar with it. Such persons are like the figures[397] which are introduced in tragedies, for as they have the shape, and dress, and personal appearance of an actor, but are not actors, so also physicians are many in title but very few in quality.
2. Whoever is to acquire a competent knowledge of medicine, ought to be possessed of the following advantages: a natural disposition; instruction; a favourable position for the study; early tuition; love of labour; leisure. First of all, a natural talent is required; for when nature opposes, everything else is vain; but when nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place, which the student must try to appropriate to himself by reflection, becoming an early pupil in a place well adapted for instruction. He must also bring to the task a love of labour and perseverance, so that the instruction taking root may bring forth proper and abundant fruits.
3. Instruction in medicine is like the culture of the productions of the earth. For our natural disposition is, as it were, the soil; the tenets of our teacher are, as it were, the seed; instruction in youth is like the planting of the seed in the ground at the proper season; the place where the instruction is communicated is like the food imparted to vegetables by the atmosphere; diligent study is like the cultivation of the fields; and it is time which imparts strength to all things and brings them to maturity.
4. Having brought all these requisites to the study of medicine, and having acquired a true knowledge of it, we shall then, in travelling through the cities, be esteemed physicians not only in name but in reality. But inexperience is a bad treasure, and a bad friend to those who possess it, whether in opinion or reality, being devoid of self-reliance and contentedness, and the nurse both of timidity and audacity. For timidity betrays a want of power, and audacity a want of skill. There are, indeed, two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant.
5. Those things which are sacred are to be imparted only to sacred persons; and it is not lawful to impart them to the profane until they have been initiated in the mysteries of the science.
The “Hippocratic collections” of works which have been attributed to Hippocrates, but the greater part of which were neither written by him, nor compiled from notes taken by his students, consists of eighty-seven treatises.