authorship.
The works indisputably written by Hippocrates display an extent of
knowledge answering to the authority of his name; his vivid descriptions
have never been excelled, if indeed they have ever been equalled. The
Hippocratic face of the dying is still retained in our medical treatises
in the original terms, without any improvement.

[Sidenote: His opinions.]

In his medical doctrine, Hippocrates starts with the postulate that the
body is composed of the four elements. From these are formed the four
cardinal humours. He thinks that the humours are liable to undergo
change; that health consists in their right constitution and proper
adjustment as to quantity; disease, in their impurities and
inequalities; that the disordered humours undergo spontaneous changes or
coction, a process requiring time, and hence the explanation of critical
days and critical discharges. The primitive disturbance of the humours
he attributed to a great variety of causes, chiefly to the influence of
physical circumstances, such as heat, cold, air, water. Unlike his
contemporaries, he did not impute all the afflictions of man to the
anger of the gods. Along with those influences of an external kind, he
studied the special peculiarities of the human system, how it is
modified by climate and manner of life, exhibiting different
predispositions at different seasons of the year. He believed that the
innate heat of the body varies with the period of life, being greatest
in infancy and least in old age, and that hence morbific agents affect
us with greater or less facility at different times. For this reason it
is that the physician should attend very closely to the condition of
those in whom he is interested as respects their diet and exercise, for
thereby he is able not only to regulate their general susceptibility,
but also to exert a control over the course of their diseases.

Referring diseases in general to the condition or distribution of the
humours, for he regards inflammation as the passing of blood into parts
not previously containing it, he considers that so long as those liquids
occupy the system in an unnatural or adulterated state, disease
continues; but as they ferment or undergo coction, various
characteristic symptoms appear, and, when their elaboration is
completed, they are discharged by perspiration or other secretions, by
alvine dejections, etc. But where such a general relief of the system is
not accomplished, the pec