Kitap 2
9
For this reason the things that we have said are not to be looked upon as proofs but rather as indications of the dullnessLit. anaesthesia. Linacre renders it indocilitas. of those who think differently, and who do not even recognise what is agreed on by everyone and is a matter of daily observation. As for the scientific proofs of all this, they are to be drawn from these principles of which I have already spokenp. 15 — namely, that bodies act upon and are acted upon by each other in virtue of the Warm, Cold, Moist and Dry. And if one is speaking of any activity, whether it be exercised by vein, liver, arteries, heart, alimentary canal, or any part, one will be inevitably compelled to acknowledge that this activity depends upon the way in which the four qualities are blended. Thus I should like to ask the Erasistrateans why it is that the stomach contracts upon the food, and why the veins generate blood. There is no use in recognizing the mere fact of contraction, without also knowing the cause; if we know this, we shall also be able to rectify the failures of function. This is no concern of ours, they say; we do not occupy ourselves with such causes as these; they are outside the sphere of the practitioner, Iatros : lit. healer. and belong to that of the scientific investigator.Lit. physicist or physiologist, the student of the physis. cf. p. 70, note 2. Are you, then, going to oppose those who maintain that the cause of the function of every organ is a natural eucrasia,That is, a blending of the four principles in their natural proportion; Lat. temperies. Dyscrasia=intemperies, distemper. that the dyscrasia is itself known as a disease, and that it is certainly by this that the activity becomes impaired? Or, on the other hand, will you be convinced by the proofs which the ancient writers furnished? Or will you take a midway course between these two, neither perforce accepting these arguments as true nor contradicting them as false, but suddenly becoming sceptics — Pyrrhonists, in fact? But if you do this you will have to shelter yourselves behind the Empiricist teaching. For how are you going to be successful in treatment, if you do not understand the real essence of each disease? Why, then, did you not call yourselves Empiricists from the beginning? Why do you confuse us by announcing that you are investigating natural activities with a view to treatment? If the stomach is, in a particular case, unable to exercise its peristaltic and grinding functions, how are we going to bring it back to the normal if we do not know the cause of its disability? What I say isThis is the orthodox Hippocratic treatment, that of opposites by opposites. Contrast the homoeopathic principle which is the basis of our modern methods of immunisation (similia similibus curentur, Hahnemann). that we must cool the over-heated stomach and warm the warm the chilled one; so also we must moisten the one which has become dried up, and conversely; so, too, in combinations of these conditions; if the stomach becomes at the same time warmer and drier than normally, the first principle of treatment is at once to chill and moisten it; and if it become colder and moister, it must be warmed and dried; so also in other cases. But how on earth are the followers of Erasistratus going to act, confessing as they do that they make no sort of investigation into the cause of disease? For the fruit of the enquiry into activities is that by knowing the causes of the dyscrasiae one may bring them back to the normal, since it is of no use for the purposes of treatment merely to know what the activity of each organ is.
