medicine thought little of the power of heat and
cold in producing health or disease ; our author,
however, rates them very low. Moreover, like the
Pythagorean physician Alcmaeon, he holds that
there is an indefinite number of "opposites," the
harmony or crasis of which produces health. The
historical Hippocrates is said to have reduced the
number of the humours to four, although I can find
no trace of this limitation to four in any treatise
earlier than the one on the Nature of Man, which
is not generally considered authentic.
It may be said that, were the external evidence
stronger, the treatise would be accepted as an
authentic work of Hippocrates.
Littré | i. pp. 294-310. Gomperz is inclined to support this
view. |
argues that the well-known passage in the
Phaedrus,| 270, C. D. Littré's discussion of the sentence
τὸ τοίνυν
περὶ φύς1εωσ2 σκόπει τί ποτε λέγει Ἱπποκράτης2 τε καὶ ὁ
ὀρθὸς2
λόγος2, to show that it does not refer to any actual words of
Hippocrates, is, of course, quite beside the mark. The
sentence means "what H. and right reason mean by περὶ
Φύς1εωσ2." |
where "Hippocrates the Asclepiad" is
mentioned as holding a theory that a knowledge
of the human body is impossible without a knowledge
of the universe--interpreted to mean an examination
of the δύναμις2 (or δυνάμεις2) of a body
according to its inter-relations with other things--refers
to Chapter XX of the περὶ ἀρχαίης2 ἰητρικῆσ2,
and not, as Galen maintains, to the treatise On the
Nature of Man. Littré also points out that a
passage
in our treatise is very similar to one in Regimen
in
Acute Diseases, the authenticity of which is undoubted.
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