Hippocrates, Vol. II (Loeb Classical Library)

Cnidian. Ermerins¹ Hippocrates, Vol. III. p. viii. makes a formidable list, amounting in all to about one-third of the Corpus, which he assigns to this school. It is easy, however, to pursue this line of argument to extremes. We cannot be sure, if we remember how commonly ancient medical writers copied one another, that the whole book is Cnidian when a passage from it is given a Cnidian origin. Nobody would argue that the second book of Diseases is the same as Cnidian Sentences just because Galen² XVII., Pt. I. p. 888. We should also note that Galen (XV. 427, 428) says that the Cnidians recognized (among other varieties of disease) four diseases of the kidneys, three kinds of tetanus and three kinds of consumption. This agrees with Internal Affections (Littré VII. 189–207). assigns to the latter a passage to which a parallel is to be found in the former, especially when we remember that Cnidian Sentences, at any rate the first edition of it, was probably written in the aphoristic style.

As in other problems connected with the Hippocratic collection, it is important to lay stress upon what we know with tolerable certainty, so as neither to argue in a circle nor to be led astray by will-o’-the-wisps. Now it is clear from the Hippocratic criticisms that the Cnidians had no sympathy with “general pathology” and the doctrine of prognosis founded upon it, and that they did consider the classification of diseases a fundamental principle of medical science. Littré³ Vol. II., pp. 200–205. argues at some length that the Hippocratic doctrine was right for the fifth century B.C., and the Cnidian for the nineteenth century A.D. Only with our increased knowledge, he urges, can the Cnidian method