e
and cause as divine from ignorance." And in another place he remarks
that each disease has its own nature, and that no one arises without a
natural cause. He seems to have been the first to grasp the conception
of the great healing powers of nature. In his long experience with the
cures in the temples, he must have seen scores of instances in which the
god had worked the miracle through the vis medicatrix naturae; and
to the shrewd wisdom of his practical suggestions in treatment may be
attributed in large part the extraordinary vogue which the great Coan
has enjoyed for twenty-five centuries. One may appreciate the veneration
with which the Father of Medicine was regarded by the attribute "divine"
which was usually attached to his name. Listen to this for directness
and honesty of speech taken from the work on the joints characterized
by Littre as "the great surgical monument of antiquity": "I have
written this down deliberately, believing it is valuable to learn of
unsuccessful experiments, and to know the causes of their non-success."

The note of freedom is not less remarkable throughout the Hippocratic
writings, and it is not easy to understand how a man brought up and
practicing within the precincts of a famous AEsculapian temple could
have divorced himself so wholly from the superstitions and vagaries
of the cult. There are probably grounds for Pliny's suggestion that he
benefited by the receipts written in the temple, registered by the
sick cured of any disease. "Afterwards," Pliny goes on to remark in
his characteristic way, "hee professed that course of Physicke which is
called Clinice Wherby physicians found such sweetnesse that afterwards
there was no measure nor end of fees," ('Natural History,' XXIX, 1).
There is no reference in the Hippocratic writings to divination;
incubation sleep is not often mentioned, and charms, incantations or the
practice of astrology but rarely. Here and there we do find practices
which jar upon modern feeling, but on the whole we feel in reading the
Hippocratic writings nearer to their spirit than to that of the Arabians
or of the many writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries A. D.
And it is not only against the thaumaturgic powers that the Hippocratic
writings protested, but they express an equally active reaction against
the excesses and defects of the new philosophy, a point brought out very
clearly by Gomperz.(24) He regards it as an undying glory of the school
of