Hippocrates, Vol. IV (Loeb Classical Library)

who acted on some definite purpose. It is, however, quite possible that the “conglomerates,” as they may be called, are really the result of an accident. A printed book goes through a fixed routine, which fact is apt to make us forget that a papyrus roll may well have been a chance collection of unconnected fragments. In the library of the medical school at Cos there were doubtless many rough drafts of essays, lecture notes, fragments from lost works, and quotations written out merely because a reader happened to find them interesting. Some tidy but not over-intelligent library-keeper might fasten together enough of these to make a roll of convenient size, giving it a title taken perhaps from the subject of the first, or perhaps from that of the longest fragment. Later on, scribes would copy the roll, and the high honor in which the Hippocratic school was held would give it a dignity to which it was not entitled by its intrinsic value.

Of course these remarks are mere guesswork. Positive evidence to support the hypothesis is very slight, but it should be noticed that a work in the Corpus often ends with a fragment taken from another work. Take, for instance, Regimen in Health. There are seven chapters of good advice on the preservation of health. The subject is treated in an orderly and logical manner, but the reader feels that at the end of the seventh chapter there is an abrupt break in the description of regimen for athletes. For the eighth chapter is a fragment from the beginning of the second book of Diseases, and gives some symptoms of “diseases arising from the brain,” and the ninth chapter is a fragment from the beginning of Affections, which