[p. 142]
can be ascribed to the vagaries or the carelessness of
scribes. Combined with the broken grammar they
seem to point to the work having never been prepared
for publication. The writer probably jotted down
his remarks as a series of notes in an order which
happened to suggest itself, and never went on to
edit them. Several of the shorter "interpolations"
would have been in a modern book footnotes or
appendices.
This theory is supported by the fact that a
very great number of the histories have no connection
at all with the constitutions. The first
three constitutions refer to Thasos ; the place of
the fourth is unnamed. The medical cases belong
to Thasos, Larisa, Abdera, Cyzicus, and Meliboea,
while many others have no locality attached to
them. The nature, too, of the diseases bears no
great likeness to those of the constitutions. They
are all "acute," some exhibit abnormal symptoms
and some are ordinary cases of remittent malaria.
They illustrate Prognostic far better than they do
the constitutions. "What do symptoms portend ?"
is the subject of Prognostic, and the clinical histories
give the data from which many of its generalizations
may well have been framed. On the whole, it is
probable that Epidemics was never published by its
author.
The subject matter of the Epidemics, including the
five books universally attributed to authors other
than Hippocrates, namely, II and IV, V, VI, VII,
present several interesting problems. For the
present I will confine myself to I and III.
What are the diseases described in the Epidemics ?
This question has interested physicians for centuries,
