The Art of Medicine

Gor returning to the end from the opposite order, or distributing the doctrine itself into its parts, which the best definition contains, as will be explained more fully later.

Therefore, all disciplines can be taught in these three ways. They are discovered, however, more by the order of resolution; they are handed down by composition; they are committed to memory, however, by the dissolution of definition. Those which lack a method observe none of these orders; for they are instituted neither by the resolution of the end, nor by the composition of those things which were discovered through resolution, nor by the dissolution and explanation of the definition. Instead, they contain various and mixed things without order; of such a kind are the Epidemia Epidemics, Prognostica Prognostics, and Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and other things of that kind, which rely on no order.

The first method, therefore, of instituting an art is made from the notion of the end through resolution.

For the notion of the end is the principle of arts which are taught by way and logic. The end is resolved into those things which are referred to it, always those closest to itself, until the final point is reached. Nothing is deliberated concerning the end; for a physician does not consult whether he ought to preserve health or defeat a disease, but he conceives the end—namely, health—simply in his mind. Then, all things which look toward it are resolved A in order,