Complete Works of Celsus, Vitruvius, Censorinus, and Frontinus

TREATISE ON MEDICINE, BOOK I.

fore experienced; and this state, powerless in itself to produce the disease, nonetheless constitutes a predisposition to new attacks. If he had had a less imperfect knowledge of the nature of things—knowledge that physicians rashly attribute to themselves (1) This is a reference to the pride of physicians who claim to know natural laws they do not fully understand.—Erasistratus would have seen that nothing happens through a single cause, but that one takes for such the one whose power is the most evident: it is thus that a circumstance which acts in isolation may, by joining with others, stir up the greatest disorders. Furthermore, Erasistratus himself, explaining fever by the passage of blood into the arteries and finding that this passage takes place when there is plethora an excess of bodily fluids or blood, could not say why, of two equally plethoric subjects, one falls ill while the other is sheltered from all danger; and this is precisely what we observe every day. One is permitted to conclude from this that this transfusion of blood, as real as it may be, does not occur only in cases of fullness, but when one of the causes already stated has come to join the plethora. As for the disciples of Themison, if they are faithful to their principles, they merit more than anyone the title of dogmatists; and although they do not admit all the opinions of the latter, it is not necessary to give them another denomination, since they are in agreement with them on this essential point: that memory alone is insufficient, and that reasoning must intervene. If, on the contrary, as it appears to be, medicine does not recognize, so to speak, any immutable precepts, the Methodists then confuse themselves with the empirics, all the more easily since the least enlightened man believes himself, like them, in a state to judge whether the disease depends on constriction or relaxation. Is it reasoning that made them know what can relax or constrict the body? They are dogmatists: have they taken only experience as a guide? They will have to range themselves among the empirics who repudiate reasoning. Thus, according to them, the knowledge of diseases is outside the art, and medicine is enclosed within practice: yet they are inferior to the empirics, for the latter embrace many things in their examination, while the Methodists limit themselves to the easiest and most vulgar observation. They act like veterinarians, who, not being able to learn from mute animals what is relative to each of them, insist only on general characteristics. This is what foreign nations also do, who, in their ignorance of any rational medicine, do not go beyond a few general data. Thus do the infirmary nurses, who, not being able to prescribe a suitable regimen for each patient, submit them all to the common regimen. Certainly, the ancient physicians did not neglect the study of general characteristics, but they went further; and Hippocrates, the physician of antiquity, tells us that to treat diseases, one must know the symptoms that bring them together and those that separate them. The Methodists themselves cannot maintain their principles; for whether the diseases depend on constriction or relaxation, they offer certain The Latin text indicates that the classification into "constriction" or "flow" is insufficient to capture the complexity of diseases.