Eight Books on Medicine

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then Herophilus and Erasistratus practiced this art in such a way that they even proceeded into different ways of healing. In those same times, medicine was divided into three parts: one which heals by diet, one by medicines, and the third by hand. The Greeks named the first diaeteticen diet-based, the second pharmaceuticen drug-based, and the third cheirourgicen surgery-based. Moreover, the authors of that part which cures diseases by diet, seeking to agitate certain things even more deeply, claimed for themselves the knowledge of the nature of things as well, as if medicine were truncated and weak without it. After them, Serapion was the first of all to profess that this rational discipline did not pertain to medicine, and placed it only in usage and experiments. Following him, Apollonius and Glaucias, and some time later Heraclides of Tarentum, and other men of no small standing, called themselves empiricos empiricists from that very profession. Thus, the medicine that cures by diet was also divided into two parts, with some claiming for themselves the rational art, and others only practice. Indeed, with no one after those who have been mentioned above agitating anything except what they had received, until Asclepiades changed the method of healing in large part. Of his successors, Themison recently himself also deflected certain things in his old age. And through these men most especially, this salutary profession has grown for us. Since, however, of the three parts of medicine, the one that heals diseases is as difficult as it is famous, we must speak of this before all else. And because the first disagreement in it is that some contend that only the knowledge of experiments is necessary for them, while others propose that practice is not sufficiently potent unless the nature of bodies and things is understood, it must be indicated what is said most on each side, so that our own opinion can be more easily interposed. Therefore, those who profess rational medicine propose that these things are necessary: knowledge of hidden causes and those that contain diseases, then manifest ones, and after these, natural actions, and lastly, the interior parts. They call hidden causes those in which it is inquired from what principles our bodies are, and what makes for health or ill health. For they do not believe that one can know how it is appropriate to cure diseases who is ignorant of where they come from. Nor is there doubt that there is a need for a different cure if something from the four principles referring to the four humors/elements either exceeds or fails and creates ill health, as some of the professors of philosophy have said. Another, if all the fault is in moistures, as seemed to Herophilus. Another, if in the spirit, as to Hippocrates. Another, if blood is transfused into those veins which are accommodated to the spirit, and excites an inflammation, which the Greeks name phlegmonen inflammation, and that inflammation produces a movement such as in a fever, as pleased Erasistratus. Another, if flowing particles block the path by subsisting in invisible pores,

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