Hippocrates Collected Works I

Hippocrates Collected Works I
By Hippocrates
Edited by: W. H. S. Jones (trans.)

Cambridge Harvard University Press 1868

Digital Hippocrates Collection Table of Contents

PREFACE

GENERAL INTRODUCTION
   1. Greek Medicine and Hippocrates
   2. The Hippocratic Collection
   3. Means of Dating Hippocratic Works
   4. Plato's References to Hippocrates
   5. THE COMMENTATORS AND OTHER ANCIENT AUTHORITIES.
   Galen
   6. LIFE OF HIPPOCRATES.
   7. THE ASCLEPIADAE.
   8. THE DOCTRINE OF HUMOURS.
   9. CHIEF DISEASES MENTIONED IN THE HIPPOCRATIC COLLECTION.
   10. πολύς AND ὀλίγος IN THE PLURAL.
   11. THE IONIC DIALECT OF THE HIPPOCRATIC COLLECTION.
   12. MANUSCRIPTS.

ANCIENT MEDICINE
   INTRODUCTION
   ANCIENT MEDICINE
   APPENDIX

AIRS WATERS PLACES
   INTRODUCTION
   MSS. AND EDITIONS.
   AIRS WATERS PLACES

EPIDEMICS I AND III
   INTRODUCTION
   EPIDEMICS I
   EPIDEMICS III: THE CHARACTERS
   EPIDEMICS III
   SIXTEEN CASES

THE OATH
Introduction
OATH

PRECEPTS
INTRODUCTION
PRECEPTS

NUTRIMENT
INTRODUCTION
NUTRIMENT

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

8. THE DOCTRINE OF HUMOURS.

[p. xlviii]

strong influence upon the Coan school of medicine, and indeed upon medical theory generally.

But the opposites are not χυμοί: they are only δυνάμεις2. The humoral pathology was not fully developed until for δυνάμεις2 were substituted fluid substances.
It is a pity that the treatise Humours tells us so little about the humours themselves. It is merely a series of notes for lectures, heads of discourse to medical students.
In tracing this development the historian is much helped by Ancient Medicine. It is here insisted that the hot, the cold, the moist and the dry are not substances; they are only "powers," and, what is more, powers of merely secondary importance.
See especially Chapters XIV-XVII, in particular XVII : ἀλλ ἔς1τικαὶ πικρὸν καὶ θερμὸν τὸ αὺτό, καὶ ὀξὺ καὶ θερμόν, καὶ ἁλμυρὸν καὶ θερμόν . . . τὰ μὲν οὖν λυμαινόμενα ταῦτ̓ ἐς1τί.
The body, it is maintained, has certain essential χυμοί, which χυμοί have properties or "powers" with greater influence upon health than temperature. The number of the χυμοί is left indefinite. If the body be composed of opposite humours, and if health be the harmonious mixture or blending (κρᾶσις) of them, we shall expect to see one or other "lording it over the others" (μοναρχία) in a state of disease.

The two commonest complaints in ancient Greece, chest troubles and malaria, suggested as chief of these humours four : phlegm, blood (suggested by hemorrhage in fevers), yellow bile and black bile (suggested by the vomits, etc., in remittent malaria).

That the humours are four is first clearly stated in Nature of Man, which Aristotle assigns to Polybus, though Menon quotes a portion of it as Hippocratic. The passage in question runs : τὸ δὲ σῶμα τοῦ ἀνθρώπου