GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Empedocles, who flourished somewhat earlier than Philolaus, was a "medicine-man" rather than a physician, though Galen calls him the founder of the Italian school of medicine Galen, Vol. X, 5.. The medical side of his teaching was partly magic and quackery.

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This combination of medicine and philosophy is clearly marked in the Hippocratic collection. Some treatises seek to explain medical phenomena by a priori Deductive, based on theoretical assumption rather than observation. assumptions, following the method of the philosophers and their use of hypotheses or postulates; others strongly oppose this method. The Roman writer Celsus, in his preface original: "Hippocrates... separated this discipline from the study of wisdom, a man distinguished both for his art and his eloquence.", asserts that Hippocrates separated medicine from philosophy. It is a fact that the best works of the Hippocratic school are as free from philosophic assumptions as they are from religious dogma.

Before attempting to estimate the work of Hippocrates, it is necessary to consider not only the doctrines of the philosophers but also the books in the Corpus that may predate Hippocrates. These include the Prenotions of Cos and the First Prorrhetic A work on prognosis., and perhaps the treatise—extant in Latin and Arabic, as the Greek original has mostly perished—On the Number Seven (peri hebdomadon).