Long Life, Short Art

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PREFACE.

When Hippocrates Ancient Greek physician understood that medicine, conceived by necessity, born of experience, and a daughter of time, meant he should dedicate himself entirely to observing the phenomena of diseases, he was well aware that the damages emerging in the human body from either the excess or the deficiency of vital force must be recalled to certain laws of discipline. Hence, the most ancient system was placed in the strict and the lax, or eutonia proper tension and atonia lack of tension, which the Roman Hippocrates, Georgius Baglivius 17th-century Italian physician, exposed in his fine treatise on the moving fiber, and from him, Boerhavius Herman Boerhaave, Dutch physician, explained more clearly. Hence the opinion deservedly collapses of those who establish that diseases are rooted radically in fluids, and denominatively in solids. Would that Hippocrates could rise from the ashes—