But scarcely less important than his recognition of disease as a natural phenomenon was the importance he attributed to prognosis.
Prognosis, in the sense of prophecy, was common before the time of Hippocrates. But prognosis, as he practised it and as we understand it to-day, is prophecy based on careful observation of the course of diseases–something more than superstitious conjecture.
Although Hippocratic medicine rested on the belief in natural causes, nevertheless, dogma and theory held an important place.
The humoral theory of disease was an all-important one, and so fully was this theory accepted that it influenced the science of medicine all through succeeding centuries. According to this celebrated theory there are four humors in the body– blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. When these humors are mixed in exact proportions they constitute health; but any deviations from these proportions produce disease. In treating diseases the aim of the physician was to discover which of these humors were out of proportion and to restore them to their natural equilibrium. It was in the methods employed in this restitution, rather than a disagreement about the humors themselves, that resulted in the various “schools” of medicine.
In many ways the surgery of Hippocrates showed a better understanding of the structure of the organs than of their functions. Some of the surgical procedures as described by him are followed, with slight modifications, to-day. Many of his methods were entirely lost sight of until modern times, and one, the treatment of dislocation of the outer end of the collar-bone, was not revived until some time in the eighteenth century.
Hippocrates, it seems, like modern physicians, sometimes suffered from the ingratitude of his patients. “The physician visits a patient suffering from fever or a wound, and prescribes for him,”
he says; “on the next day, if the patient feels worse the blame is laid upon the physician; if, on the other hand, he feels better, nature is extolled, and the physician reaps no praise.”
The essence of this has been repeated in rhyme and prose by writers in every age and country, but the “father of medicine”
cautions physicians against allowing it to influence their attitude towards their profession.
VIII. POST-SOCRATIC SCIENCE AT ATHENS–PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AND
THEOPHRASTUS
Doubtless it has been noticed that our earlier scientists were as
far removed as possible from the limitations of specialism. In point of fact, in this early day, knowledge had not been classified as it came to be later on. The philosopher was, as his name implied, a lover of knowledge, and he did not find it beyond the reach of his capacity to apply himself to all departments of the field of human investigation. It is nothing strange to discover that Anaximander and the Pythagoreans and Anaxagoras have propounded theories regarding the structure of the cosmos, the origin and development of animals and man, and the nature of matter itself. Nowadays, so enormously involved has become the mass of mere facts regarding each of these departments of knowledge that no one man has the temerity to attempt to master them all. But it was different in those days of beginnings. Then the methods of observation were still crude, and it was quite the custom for a thinker of forceful personality to find an eager following among disciples who never thought of putting his theories to the test of experiment. The great lesson that true science in the last resort depends upon observation and measurement, upon compass and balance, had not yet been learned, though here and there a thinker like Anaxagoras had gained an inkling of it.
For the moment, indeed, there in Attica, which was now, thanks to that outburst of Periclean culture, the centre of the world’s civilization, the trend of thought was to take quite another direction. The very year which saw the birth of Democritus at Abdera, and of Hippocrates, marked also the birth, at Athens, of another remarkable man, whose influence it would scarcely be possible to over-estimate. This man was Socrates. The main facts of his history are familiar to every one. It will be recalled that Socrates spent his entire life in Athens, mingling everywhere with the populace; haranguing, so the tradition goes, every one who would listen; inculcating moral lessons, and finally incurring the disapprobation of at least a voting majority of his fellow-citizens. He gathered about him a company of remarkable men with Plato at their head, but this could not save him from the disapprobation of the multitudes, at whose hands he suffered death, legally administered after a public trial. The facts at command as to certain customs of the Greeks at this period make it possible to raise a question as to whether the alleged “corruption of youth,” with which Socrates was charged, may not have had a different implication from what posterity has preferred to ascribe to it. But this thought, almost shocking to the modern mind and seeming altogether sacrilegious to most students of Greek philosophy, need not here detain us; neither have we much concern in the present connection with any part of the teaching of the martyred philosopher. For the historian of metaphysics, Socrates marks an epoch, but for the historian of science he is a much less consequential figure.