A detailed woodcut illustration depicts a classical scene, likely an academy of medicine or philosophy. In the center, a scholar sits at a desk, surrounded by students engaged in study and debate. The architectural background features classical arches and columns.

INTRODUCTORY TABLES

TO MEDICINE.

A complex branching diagram illustrates the categorization of medical knowledge, connecting general definitions to specific physiological and pathological branches.

Medicine is the science by which the disposition of the human body is known, insofar as a person is healthy or deviates from health, so that the present state may be maintained and the lost state recovered.

It is divided into:

• Theory, which is concerned with the contemplation of things.
  • Natural things, which are seven in number.
    • Elements.
    • Temperaments, or crases, complexions, or mixtures.
    • Humors, or compositions.
    • Members.
    • Virtues.
    • Actions.
    • Spirits.
  • Non-natural things, which are also seven in number.
    • Surrounding air periechon the encompassing environment.
    • Motion and rest.
    • Food and drink.
    • Sleep and wakefulness.
    • Excretions and retentions.
    • Perturbations of the mind.
    • Venus sexual intercourse. We place this in the seventh position not only by the authority of Galen, who set it apart in the art of medicine, but also by the authority of more recent writers, although the general run of physicians place it partly under motion and partly under excrements.
  • Things contrary to nature, which are three in number.
    • Disease.
    • Cause or occasion.
    • Sign.

To which some others have added four parts, namely:

• Ages.
• Colors.
• Figures, or modes and qualities of bodies.
• Distinctions between male and female.

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Practice, by which is understood not only the action of the physician and praxis action, but also the knowledge of the mode of acting: for Theory is the science of principles, while practice is the science of quality and the mode of acting; see Table 9.