Aphorisms of Hippocrates

he your life; for it is a vapor, appearing for a little time, and then vanishing. That is, "What is your life? It is a vapor that appears for a little time, and then vanishes." This vapor vanishes, and this flickering little flame of life is easily extinguished by a defect in diet, by the infamy of a place, by a disease of the climate, by a poisonous quality, or by an obstruction of a principal part, whose function life cannot lack, by an inflammation, or by some other injury that brings about a change in state. Rightly does Sophocles say:

O mortal and wretched race of men,
How nothing we are, resembling shadows.

That is: O mortal and wretched race of men, how nothing we are, but resembling shadows.
Thus, not unfittingly, that player Lucian, in Charon, rendered it when he says the life of man is like bubbles, which, as soon as they are born, vanish; others last a little longer: by itself our life is short. Moreover, it can be called short if it is compared with the Medical art, which is surely long. As if Hippocrates were to say, therefore this art must be handed down with the utmost brevity; and such is this method which is delivered through apotelesmata (results), enclosed in Aphorisms.

3. Hippocrates calls medicine a long art. Lest I be too long, I have briefly demonstrated in the second chapter of the first book of our Medical Institutions What art is according to Hippocrates. how you may rightly call that art or science. Here, indeed, the name of art is taken by Hippocrates more broadly, namely for the history of all things that pertain to Medicine, so that it may be permitted to describe this art thus: The Medical art is the history, or the description and knowledge, of the affections of nature—salubrious, insalubrious, and neutral—and likewise of signs, causes, diet, surgery, and medicines.

4. But this art is long, because of the difficulty,