[p. 2]discoveries
have been made, during a length of time, and others will yet be found
out, if a person possessed of the proper ability, and knowing those
discoveries which have been made, should proceed from them to prosecute
his investigations. But whoever, rejecting and despising all these,
attempts to pursue another course and form of inquiry, and says he
has discovered anything, is deceived himself and deceives others,
for the thing is impossible. And for what reason it is impossible,
I will now endeavor to explain, by stating and showing what the art
really is. From this it will be manifest that discoveries cannot possibly
be made in any other way. And most especially, it appears to me, that
whoever treats of this art should treat of things which are familiar
to the common people. For of nothing else will such a one have to
inquire or treat, but of the diseases under which the common people
have labored, which diseases and the causes of their origin and departure,
their increase and decline, illiterate persons cannot easily find
out themselves, but still it is easy for them to understand these
things when discovered and expounded by others. For it is nothing
more than that every one is put in mind of what had occurred to himself.
But whoever does not reach the capacity of the illiterate vulgar and
fails to make them listen to him, misses his mark. Wherefore, then,
there is no necessity for any hypothesis.
PART 3
For the art of Medicine would not have been invented at first, nor
would it have been made a subject of investigation (for there would
have been no need of it), if when men are indisposed, the same food
and other articles of regimen which they eat and drink when in good
health were proper for them, and if no others were preferable to these.
But now necessity itself made medicine to be sought out and discovered
by men, since the same things when administered to the sick, which
agreed with them when in good health, neither did nor do agree with
them. But to go still further back, I hold that the diet and food
which people in health now use would not have been discovered, provided
it had suited with man to eat and drink in like manner as the ox,
the horse, and all other animals, except man, do of the productions
of the earth, such as fruits, weeds, and grass; for from such things
these animals
