drink water. By using such a diet, I know that he will suffer much and severely, for he will experience pains, his body will become weak, and his bowels deranged, and he will not subsist long. What remedy, then, is to be provided for one so situated-hot, or cold, or moist, or dry? for it is clear it must be one of these. For according to this principle, if it is one of these which is injuring the patient, it is to be removed by its contrary. But the surest and most obvious remedy is to change the diet which the person used, and instead of wheat to give bread, and instead of raw flesh boiled, and to drink wine in addition to these for by making these changes it is impossible but that he must get better unless completely disorganized by time and diet. What then shall we say? whether that as he suffered from cold, these things being hot were of use to him, or the reverse? I should think this question must prove a puzzler to whomsoever it is put." An opinion in which we doubt not his readers entirely coincide.

We find, then, that Hippocrates, so far from countenancing the doctrine of curing diseases by applying the contraries to their supposed causes, condemns the notion as utterly absurd. But let us not rush into the opposite error, and because Hippocrates is opposed to the dogma of contraria contrariis, assume that he is in favour of its opposite, similia similibus curantur. In the above quotation he is shown as objecting to assuming imaginary causes at all, as subjects of treatment, and consequently, he would object as much to the principle of similarity as opposition. It is true there is a remarkable passage in favour of the doctrines now known as Homoeopathic in one of the Hippocratic treatises, which, although of questionable authenticity, is of undoubted antiquity, and has received the greatest respect from all commentators. On it our learned countryman, Dr. Adains, remarks: "It thus

1 Hippoc. on Ancient Med. p. 169.

appears that the principles both of Allopathy and Homœopathy are recognized by the author of this treatise."I

Although Hippocrates dealt in this summary style with the obvious false reasonings of the Dogmatists, exposing them with Socratic conciseness and subtilty, yet he was very far indeed from rejecting inference and induction, and the application of a strictly-philosophic method in dealing with difficulties which he was unable to surmount by previous experience. So that when Celsus says he was the first to separate medicine from philosophy, he must mean by the latter term the signification it had at the time of Hippocrates, not at the time when he himself wrote; much less what we mean by philosophy. In fact, as we shall see by-and-by, Hippocrates unconsciously discovered the inductive method, and used it as far as he possibly could, being as much allied to the Dogmatists, whose errors he so mercilessly exposes, as to the Empirics.

The

But

The Empirics suffer from the prejudice of what the name by which they were called came afterwards to signify. term is now deservedly used as one of reproach. originally it meant rather what we should now call the school of experiment and experience. They held that “it is much better to seek relief from things certain and tried, that is, from such remedies as experience in the method of curing has taught us, as is done in other arts; for that neither a husbandman nor a pilot are qualified for their business by reasoning, but by practice; and that these disquisitions have no connection with medicine, may be inferred from the plain fact, that physicians, whose opinions on these matters have been directly opposite to one another, have, notwithstanding, equally restored their patients to health: that this success was to be ascribed to their having derived their methods of cure, not from the occult causes (such as changes in the elements), or the

1 Adams' Hippoc. p. 77.

1

The

natural actions (changes in the temperaments) about which they are divided, but from experiments, according as they succeeded in the course of their practice.' Now, although Hippocrates says that "experience is fallacious,” and therefore "judginent difficult," he would be the last man to discard experience altogether. Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of medicine making a single step without experiment or experience unless we had a revelation. The question is, what the kind of experiment and experience is to be? If we have nothing but these to guide us, how are we to act in new circumstances? experience which taught us how to treat a sword-cut will not help us to cure the gout. To this the Empiric would reply that the objection, so far as it went, was an inherent difficulty in the acquisition of all knowledge of matters beyond the immediate consciousness of the human mind; and that we must make the best of it by accumulating experience and registering it so as to make it available, and by separating what is essential from what is accidental in the conditions of every case of cure. This they called, technically, "History." When we have no exact parallel to fall back upon in any puzzling case we must take the one nearest to it. Thus the art of medicine formed a tripod, consisting of observation, history, and analogy.

2

If the Empirics did not embrace the whole truth, they at least propounded doctrines both true and most important; and it is probable that the severe criticism they have met with is owing more to the violent and exclusive spirit of the teachers, than to the reprehensible character of the teaching. They seem, like not a few moderns, to have slighted large cultivation and exalted the technical above the general endowments of the physician. This circumstance accounts for the admirable observation of Celsus, which

1 Celsus. Op. cit. 2 Galen de Sect.

Le Clerc, Op. cit.

p. 343. Sprengel, Op. cit. Vol. I. p. 576.

"1

would otherwise be irrelevant :-" Although many things are taken into the study of the arts which do not, properly speaking, belong to the arts themselves, yet they may greatly improve them by quickening the genius of the artists. Wherefore the contemplation of nature, though it cannot make a man a physician, yet may render him fitter for the practice of medicine.' What an admirable rebuke to those who raise the cry of "Cui bono?" whenever it is proposed to liberalize the profession of medicine by giving a higher character to University medical degrees! "Can logic," say these medical Falstaffs, "set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Logic hath no skill in surgery then? No." Wherefore, as I am going to be a pure surgeon, "I'll none of it."

Between the Empirics, or experimentalists, on the one side, and the Rationalists, or speculators, on the other, arose another sect who maintained, according to Celsus, "that the knowledge of no cause whatever bears the least relation to the method of cure; and that it is sufficient to observe some general symptoms of diseases; and that there are three kinds of diseases, one bound, another fluent, or attended with some kind of discharge, and the third a mixture of the two." That these kinds of distempers are sometimes acute and sometimes chronic, sometimes at their stage of development, sometimes at their acmé, sometimes at their decline. "That one kind of treatment is required in acute, another in chronic; one when a disease is developing, another when it is at its acmé, and, again, another when it is declining into health." That the observation of these things constitute the art of medicine which they define as a certain way of proceeding, or method. Hence they got the name of Methodists. The corresponding sobriquet in modern English is, perhaps, Routinists. They differ from the Empirics in holding experi

1 Celsus. Op. cit.

ments to be of comparatively little value, and from the Rationalists, in disallowing conjectures about the hidden causes of disease.' They were, in fact, the first nosologists, or classifiers of diseases; and they have had a large following from the time of Themison of Laodicea,-who lived in the first century of the Christian era, and who may have been a member of the Church which St. John eharges with being neither "cold nor hot," but of a certain neutral temperature in religious zeal, as he undoubtedly was in medical speculation,- to the days of Cullen, who lived in the reign of George III., and practised in Edinburgh, whence he influenced the whole medical world, during his life and long after his decease.

3

This sect, too, upheld a principle of fundamental and permanent importance in the growth of art-the principle of Tradition. Method or routine is good if the method be good. It is only by some classification that the most capacious and strongest memory can retain the almost infinite variety of morbid phenomena which constitute diseases, and arrange them side by side with the remedial appliances fitted for their removal. All practical men must be, more or less, lovers and followers of routine; it is essential to the despatch of business. Such being the case, it is unwise to denounce routine, or certain method, if it be confined to its proper place—that is, if the arrangement of diseases rests upon some real identity or similarity of their nature, not upon an imaginary or assumed For example, we know that certain symptoms

one.

1 Celsus, Op. cit. Preface.

2 The Themison who has had the misfortune to be immortalized by Juvenal in the line

"Quot Themison ægros autumno occi

derit uno,"

is probably not the great Methodist, as Le Clerc supposes, but a namesake, perhaps a son, who lived at Rome a generation later than the Laodicæan. Ju

venal speaks of a contemporary, and the earliest satire was written at the very end of the first century.-Smith's Class. Dict., Art. "Juvenal and Themison."

3" And unto the angel of the church of the Laodicæans write, 'I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot I would thou wert cold or hot."" -Rev. iii.

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