previous next

PART 12

XII. Such constitutions, I contend, that rapidly and severely feel the effects of errors, are weaker than the others. A weak man is but one step removed from a sickly man, but a sickly man is weaker still, and is more apt to suffer distress whenever he misses the due season. And, while the art can admit of such nice exactness, it is difficult always to attain perfect accuracy. But many departments of medicine have reached such a pitch of exactness, and I will speak about them later. I declare, however, that we ought not to reject the ancient art as non-existent, or on the ground that its method of inquiry is faulty, just because it has not attained exactness in every detail, but much rather, because it has been able by reasoning to rise from deep ignorance to approximately perfect accuracy, I think we ought to admire the discoveries as the work, not of chance, but of inquiry rightly and correctly conducted.

[p. 35]

Hippocrates Collected Works I. Hippocrates. W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1868.

National Library of Medicine History of Medicine Division provided support for entering this text.

This text was converted to electronic form by Data Entry and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (W. H. S. Jones, 1868)
load focus English (Charles Darwin Adams, 1868)
hide References (6 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: