and his very words are
daily on our lips. If asked what was the great contribution to medicine
of Hippocrates and his school we could answer--the art of careful
observation.

In the Hippocratic writings is summed up the experience of Greece to the
Golden Age of Pericles. Out of philosophy, out of abstract speculation,
had come a way of looking at nature for which the physicians were mainly
responsible, and which has changed forever men's views on disease.
Medicine broke its leading strings to religion and philosophy--a
tottering, though lusty, child whose fortunes we are to follow in these
lectures. I have a feeling that, could we know more of the medical
history of the older races of which I spoke in the first lecture, we
might find that this was not the first-born of Asklepios, that there
had been many premature births, many still-born offspring, even
live-births--the products of the fertilization of nature by the human
mind; but the record is dark, and the infant was cast out like Israel in
the chapter of Isaiah. But the high-water mark of mental achievement
had not been reached by the great generation in which Hippocrates had
labored. Socrates had been dead sixteen years, and Plato was a man of
forty-five, when far away in the north in the little town of Stagira, on
the peninsula of Mount Athos in Macedoniawas, in 384 B.C., born a "man
of men," the one above all others to whom the phrase of Milton may be
applied. The child of an Asklepiad, Nicomachus, physician to the father
of Philip, there must have been a rare conjunction of the planets at
the birth of the great Stagirite. In the first circle of the "Inferno,"
Virgil leads Dante into a wonderful company, "star-seated" on the
verdure (he says)--the philosophic family looking with reverence on "the
Master of those who know"--il maestro di color che sanno.(28) And with
justice has Aristotle been so regarded for these twenty-three
centuries. No man has ever swayed such an intellectual empire--in logic,
metaphysics, rhetoric, psychology, ethics, poetry, politics and natural
history, in all a creator, and in all still a master. The history of
the human mind--offers no parallel to his career. As the creator of
the sciences of comparative anatomy, systematic zoology, embryology,
teratology, botany and physiology, his writings have an eternal
interest. They present an extraordinary accumulation of facts relating
to the structure and functions of various parts of the body