similar circumstances. _Philinus of
Cos_, a pupil of Herophilus, declared that all the anatomy he had
learned from his master did not help him in the least to cure diseases.
Philinus, according to Galen, founded the Empirici, the first schismatic
sect in medicine. Celsus[10] wrote of this sect that they admit that
evident causes are necessary, but deprecate inquiry into them because
Nature is incomprehensible. This is proved because the philosophers and
physicians who have spent so much labour in trying to search out these
occult causes cannot agree amongst themselves. If reasoning could make
physicians, the philosophers should be most successful practitioners, as
they have such abundance of words. If the causes of diseases were the
same in all places, the same remedies ought to be used everywhere.
Relief from sickness is to be sought from things certain and tried, that
is from experience, which guides us in all other arts. Husbandmen and
pilots do not reason about their business, but they practise it.
Disquisitions can have no connection with medicine, because physicians
whose opinions have been directly opposed to one another have equally
restored their patients to health; they did not derive their methods of
cure from studying the occult causes about which they disputed, but from
the experience they had of the remedies which they employed upon their
patients. Medicine was not first discovered in consequence of reasoning,
but the theory was sought for after the discovery of medicine. Does
reason, they ask, prescribe the same as experience, or something
different? If the same, it must be needless; if different, it must be
mischievous.

In the third and second centuries before Christ, many physicians wrote
commentaries on diseases and attacked the teaching of Hippocrates.
Among these, _Serapion of Alexandria_, an Empiric who lived in the third
century before Christ, is noteworthy for having first used sulphur in
the treatment of skin diseases, and Heraclides wrote on strangulated
hernia. Serapion added somewhat to the system of Philinus, and was
responsible for introducing the principle of analogy into the system of
Empiricism. The foundation of Empiricism marked the decline of the
medical school of Alexandria. We are indebted to Celsus for a full
description of the teaching of this sect, and, at the same time, for an
exposure of its fallacies. Serapion was a convert from the school of
Cos, which was the stronghold of m