Aphorisms of Hippocrates

cause of blood happen to another, he will not think it is disastrous. Thus, white urine indicates diverse affections: phrenitis, and sometimes cold. A colicky patient from cold humors is usually driven away by hot things; a colicky patient born from bile is born from the most bitter power of hot kidneys. With what face will Empiricism make medicine from these? I certainly know that I do not wish to give myself to be cured by those who, as often as I have eaten radish or pepper, are immediately drawn into the most atrocious colicky pain. Let those be far from us: for as the wise Pindar warns,

There is no health in remedies.

Ol. 2.

* For the minds of the inexperienced are lighter.

Experience is indeed dangerously fallacious, and fallaciously dangerous, while it attempts in the human fabric those things which have not been proven by long time: for the end of rash experience is certain death. It is indeed a most atrocious crime to rashly handle the human body, the dwelling of the eternal soul, and the habitation of the Holy Spirit. There is another experience which joins judgment, observation as in the mode of the affection which is being treated, and in its outcome, not without judgment. To this, Lasus once answered when asked what was wisest? "Experience," he replied. But rash experience is full of danger, unless God himself sometimes succors: for we often see it happen to one in danger as it did to Marius in Sallust, where he says: "Here, by chance, the corrected rashness of Marius found glory from fault." For this rashness is born from an unhappy imprudence which precipitates itself and many others.

Stobaeus, fol. 705.

8. This judgment is concerned with the distinction of similar and dissimilar diseases, causes, bodies, signs, and remedies: from which distinction, when perfectly perceived, the method of knowing, predicting, and healing is compared. Brilliantly: