Kitap 1
13
Now Hippocrates, who was the first known to us of all those who have been both physicians and philosophers in as much as he was the first to recognize what Nature effects, expresses his admiration of her, and is constantly singing her praises and calling her just. Alone, he says, she suffices for the animal in every respect, performing of her own accord and without any teaching all that is required. Being such, she has, as he supposes, certain faculties, one attractive of what is appropriate,cf. p. 36, note 2. and another eliminative of what is foreign, and she nourishes the animal, makes it grow, and expels its diseases by crisis.The morbid material passed successively through the stages of crudity, coction (pepsis ) and elimination (crisis ). For critical days cf. p. 74, note 1. Therefore he says that there is in our bodies a concordance in the movements of air and fluid, and that everything is in sympathy. According to Asclepiades, however, nothing is naturally in sy mpathy with anything else, all substance being divided and broken up into inharmonious elements and absurd molecules. Necessarily, then, besides making countless other statements in opposition to plain fact, he was ignorant of Nature's faculties, both that attracting what is appropriate, and that expelling what is foreign. Thus he invented some wretched nonsense to explain blood-production and anadosis,This was the process by which nutriment was taken up from the alimentary canal; absoprtion, dispersal; cf. p. 13, note 5. The subject is dealt with more fully in chap. xvi. and, being utterly unable to find anything to say regarding the clearing-outLit. catharsis. of superfluities, he did not hesitate to join issue with obvious facts, and, in this matter of urinary secretion, to deprive both the kidneys and the ureters of their activity, by assuming that there were certain invisible channels opening into the bladder. It was, of course, a grand and impressive thing to do, to mistrust the obvious, and to pin one's faith in things which could not be seen!
