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.
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