9. The Asclepiadæ would appear to have accommodated and directed their art to this natural Therapia. Hence the advice that convulsions arising from a great hemorrhage, forcibly stopped, should be cured by the abstraction of blood. It is to be regretted that but a few monuments of their practice remain; but these embrace admirable imitations of nature, and the most prudent caution in administering remedies.
10. Neither did they neglect surgery, but deliver many excellent remarks on things pertaining to wounds, ulcers, and fractures.
11. Although it cannot be made out for certain that everything which is preserved in these writings existed before Hippocrates, there can be no doubt that many of them are more ancient than he. And although we may attribute some things rather to Hippocrates himself, it is nevertheless certain that the method of deducing the art from observation and comparison had existed before him. Some may, perhaps, object that these books are to be attributed to the youth of Hippocrates, and that the others, more elaborate and perfect, had proceeded from the same person in his old age; but this supposition we may refute by a single argument, namely, that it would be absurd to ascribe so many observations about so many diseases to one man.
12. From the whole Coan system of cultivating medicine, the best hopes might justly have been expected; and from what follows it will be seen that the result did not disappoint this expectation.”
These deductions, I must say, appear to be most legitimately drawn; and having thus satisfactorily made out that the “Coacæ Prænotiones” are founded on the “Prorrhetics,” Dr. Ermerins proceeds to make an interesting comparison between the former and the book of “Prognostics.” Here again we can only find room for the general conclusions.
1. “We have compared together two monuments of antiquity embracing entirely the same doctrine, so that we may hold it as put out of all doubt that they must have derived their origin from the same school, only the one yields to the other in antiquity, as its more expanded mode of expression shows.
2. The more recent work is attributed to Hippocrates by all the critics and interpreters; the most ancient authors have made mention of it, and all the characteristic marks by which the genuine works of Hippocrates are distinguished from the spurious, without doubt, are found in it; for whether you look to the brevity and gravity of the language, or the paucity of the reasonings, the correctness of the observations, or the dialect in which they are expressed, or, in fine, its agreement with the whole Hippocratic doctrine,—all these attest that “the divine old man” is the author of this work.
3. From a comparison of the “Coacæ Prænotiones” with the “Prognostics,” it is as clear as the light of day that Hippocrates composed this work from them, in such a manner that he circumscribed many of the symptoms, limited the enunciations, and amplified them all by his own experience in the medical Art. Hence the Prognostics may not inaptly be called the Commentary of Hippocrates on the “Coacæ Prænotiones.”
4. With regard to the exquisite and artificial order, in which we see many things proposed in his book, we agree entirely with Sprengel, who thinks that they have proceeded from a more recent describer. This is confirmed by our comparison of both works.
5. This work exhibits the fundamental principles and originals of the Hippocratic doctrine, and although we hardly know anything as to the manlier in which Hippocrates composed his writings, and of the form which he gave them, it does not seem at all out of the way to hold this book to be the oldest of all the works which “the Father of Medicine” has left to us.