and concise writer. "Life is short," he says, "opportunity fleeting,
judgment difficult, treatment easy, but treatment after thought is
proper and profitable."

His knowledge of anatomy was necessarily very imperfect, and was gained
largely from his predecessors, to whom he gave full credit. Dissections
of the human body were forbidden him, and he was obliged to confine
his experimental researches to operations on the lower animals. His
knowledge of the structure and arrangement of the bones, however, was
fairly accurate, but the anatomy of the softer tissues, as he conceived
it, was a queer jumbling together of blood-vessels, muscles, and
tendons. He does refer to "nerves," to be sure, but apparently the
structures referred to are the tendons and ligaments, rather than the
nerves themselves. He was better acquainted with the principal organs
in the cavities of the body, and knew, for example, that the heart is
divided into four cavities, two of which he supposed to contain blood,
and the other two air.

His most revolutionary step was his divorcing of the supernatural from
the natural, and establishing the fact that disease is due to natural
causes and should be treated accordingly. The effect of such an attitude
can hardly be over-estimated. The establishment of such a theory was
naturally followed by a close observation as to the course of diseases
and the effects of treatment. To facilitate this, he introduced the
custom of writing down his observations as he made them--the "clinical
history" of the case. Such clinical records are in use all over the
world to-day, and their importance is so obvious that it is almost
incomprehensible that they should have fallen into disuse shortly after
the time of Hippocrates, and not brought into general use again until
almost two thousand years later.

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