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ANCIENT MEDICINE
PART 1
I. ALL who, on attempting to speak or to write
on medicine, have assumed for themselves a postulate
as a basis for their discussion--heat, cold, moisture,
dryness, or anything else that they may fancy--who
narrow down the causal principle of diseases
and of death among men, and make it the same
in all cases, postulating one thing or two, all these
obviously blunder in many points even of their statements, Or,
reading καινοῖς1ι κ.τ.λ., "of their
novelties." |
but they are most open to censure because
they blunder in what is an art, and one which all
men use on the most important occasions, and give
the greatest honours to the good craftsmen and
practitioners in it. Some practitioners are poor,
others very excellent ; this would not be the case if
an art of medicine did not exist at all, and had not
been the subject of any research and discovery, but
all would be equally inexperienced and unlearned
therein, and the treatment of the sick would be
in all respects haphazard. But it is not so ; just
as in all other arts the workers vary much in skill
and in knowledge,Or "manual skill" and "intelligence." | so also
is it in the case of
medicine. Wherefore I have deemed that it has
|