He suggested the
definition of health as the maintenance of equilibrium, or an "isonomy"
in the material qualities of the body. Of all the South Italian
physicians of this period, the personality of none stands out in
stronger outlines than that of Empedocles of Agrigentum--physician,
physiologist, religious teacher, politician and poet. A wonder-worker,
also, and magician, he was acclaimed in the cities as an immortal god
by countless thousands desiring oracles or begging the word of healing.
That he was a keen student of nature is witnessed by many recorded
observations in anatomy and physiology; he reasoned that sensations
travel by definite paths to the brain. But our attention must be
confined to his introduction of the theory of the four elements--fire,
air, earth and water--of which, in varying quantities, all bodies were
made up. Health depended upon the due equilibrium of these primitive
substances; disease was their disturbance. Corresponding to those were
the four essential qualities of heat and cold, moisture and dryness, and
upon this four-fold division was engrafted by the later physicians the
doctrine of the humors which, from the days of Hippocrates almost to our
own, dominated medicine.
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