His method of cultivating medicine is founded on an attentive examination of all the circumstances connected with real life, and his system consists in studying the condition of the humors in the body, their origin, their coction, and their disappearance.
The most prominent feature, however, in the contents of this little treatise is the practical view which is here given of the origin of medicine, namely, from the necessities and weaknesses of the human race. The author clearly makes it out that Medicine is, as it were, a corollary to Dietetics. Nothing of the kind can well be imagined more ingenious and original than his observations and reasonings on this head in the introductory sections to this treatise. See in particular § 5.
The remarks in refutation of the hypothesis of cold, heat, moist, and dry, are very interesting. (§ 13.)
The reflections on the origin of fevers and inflammations are very just and original, but would appear not to have been properly appreciated by his successors; for among all the ancient authors who have treated of fevers, there is, perhaps, no one but himself who has stated in decided terms that there is something more in a fever than a mere increase of the innate (or animal) heat. See the Commentary on Paulus Ægineta, B. II., 1.
The remarks on the effects of the cold bath at § 16 are much to the purpose, and deserve attention.
The observations on rheums or defluxions (§ 19) are also very striking, and even at the present day, after the many vicissitudes of medical theory which we have gone through, it would be difficult to deny that the opinions here advanced are well founded. At all events they must be allowed to be highly interesting, as containing the first germ of a theory which long flourished in the schools of medicine.
At § 20 the author seems to hold that philosophy is not so necessary to medicine as medicine is to philosophy. Schulze, with a considerable show of reason, argues that Celsus had this passage in view when he pronounced, concerning Hippocrates, that he was the first person who separated medicine from philosophy. (Hist. Med. I., 3, i., 26.) Schulze contends that what Celsus meant was, that Hippocrates discarded à priori arguments in medicine, and drew all his inferences from actual observation. This would appear to me the most plausible interpretation which has ever been given to this celebrated passage in the preface of Celsus. Philosophy, then, it would appear, freed medicine from the delusions of superstition, by substituting the errors of hypothesis in their place, and the important office which he who was called the Father of Medicine conferred upon the art was by discarding both superstition and hypothesis, and substituting the results of actual observation in the room of both.
From § 22 to the end of the work the author gives important observations on the modifications which diseases undergo in connection with the peculiar organization of the part in which they are situated. It may well be doubted whether the remarks and reflections herein contained have ever obtained all the attention which they merit.
The style of this piece is certainly elegant and beautiful; and it is proper to mention that the text is remarkably improved in M. Littré’s edition. In all the previous editions it was more corrupt than that of almost any other of the Hippocratic treatises.
The following remarks of M. Littré on the present work appear to me so just, and are so elegantly expressed, that I cannot deny myself the pleasure of introducing them here in the original: