GENERAL INTRODUCTION

These three works show certain characteristics that, although they provide no internal clue to their specific date or authorship, convince the reader that they were written by the same man, and at a time before the great period of Greece had passed away. In a subtle yet very real way, they remind one of the historian Thucydides.

The style of each work is grave and austere. There is no attempt at "window-dressing"; language is used to express thought, not to adorn it. Not a word is wasted. The first two treatises have a literary finish, yet there is no trace of sophistic rhetoric. Thought and the expression of thought are evenly balanced. Both are clear and dignified—even majestic.

The content is even more striking than the style. The spirit is truly scientific in the modern and strictest sense of the word. There is no superstition and, except perhaps regarding the doctrine of "critical days," no philosophy. Instead, there is close, minute observation of symptoms and their sequences, acute remarks on remedies, and a record—without inference—of the atmospheric phenomena that preceded or accompanied certain "epidemics." Especially noteworthy are the clinical histories, which are admirable for their inclusion of everything relevant and their exclusion of everything that is not.

The doctrine of these three treatises may be summarized as follows: