" No words could more clearly express the views of disease which,
as I mentioned, prevailed until quite recent years. The black bile,
melancholy, has given us a great word in the language, and that we have
not yet escaped from the humoral pathology of Hippocrates is witnessed
by the common expression of biliousness--"too much bile"--or "he has a
touch of the liver." The humors, imperfectly mingled, prove irritant in
the body. They are kept in due proportion by the innate heat which, by
a 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.
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