sort of internal coction gradually changes the humors to their
proper proportion. Whatever may be the primary cause of the
change in the humors manifesting itself in disease, the innate
heat, or as Hippocrates terms it, the nature of the body itself,
tends to restore conditions to the norm; and this change
occurring suddenly, or abruptly, he calls the "crisis," which is
accomplished on some special day of the disease, and is often
accompanied by a critical discharge, or by a drop in the body
temperature. The evil, or superabundant, humors were discharged
and this view of a special materies morbi, to be got rid of by a
natural processor a crisis, dominated pathology until quite
recently. Hippocrates had a great belief in the power of nature,
the vis medicatrix naturae, to restore the normal state. A keen
observer and an active practitioner, his views of disease, thus
hastily sketched, dominated the profession for twenty-five
centuries; indeed, echoes of his theories are still heard in the
schools, and his very words are daily on our lips. If asked what
was the great contribution to medicine of Hippocrates and his
school we could answer--the art of careful observation.
In the Hippocratic writings is summed up the experience of Greece
to the Golden Age of Pericles. Out of philosophy, out of
abstract speculation, had come a way of looking at nature for
which the physicians were mainly responsible, and which has
changed forever men's views on disease. Medicine broke its
leading strings to religion and philosophy--a tottering, though
lusty, child whose fortunes we are to follow in these lectures. I
have a feeling that, could we know more of the medical history of
the older races of which I spoke in the first lecture, we might
find that this was not the first-born of Asklepios,that there had
been many premature births, many still-born offspring, even
live-births-- the products of the fertilization of nature by the
human mind; but the record is dark, and the infant was cast out
like Israel in the chapter of Isaiah. But the high-water mark of
mental achievement had not been reached by the great generation
in which Hippocrates had labored. Socrates had been dead sixteen
years, and Plato was a man of forty-five, when far away in the
north in the little town of Stagira, on the peninsula of Mount
Athos in Macedoniawas, in 384 B.C., born a "man of men," the one
above all others to whom the phrase of Milton may be applied. The
child of an Asklepiad, Nicomachus, physician to the father of
Philip, there must have been a rare conjunction of the planets at
the birth of the great Stagirite. In the first circle of the
"Inferno," Virgil leads Dante into a wonderful company,
"star-seated" on the verdure (he says)--the philosophic family
looking with reverence on "the Master of those who know"--il
maestro di color che sanno.[28] And with justice has Aristotle
been so regarded for these twenty-three centuries. No man has
ever swayed such an intellectual empire--in logic, metaphysics,
rhetoric, psychology, ethics, poetry, politics and natural
history, in all a creator, and in all still a master. The history
of the human mind--offers no parallel to his career. As the
creator of the sciences of comparative anatomy, systematic
zoology, embryology, teratology, botany and physiology, his
writings have an eternal interest. They present an extraordinary
accumulation of facts relating to the structure and functions of
various parts of the body. It is an unceasing wonder how one man,