Hippocrates, De prisca medicina
W. H. S. Jones, Ed.

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PART 8

VIII. A consideration of the diet of the sick, as compared with that of men in health, would show that the diet of wild beasts and of animals generally is not more harmful, as compared with that of men in health.¹ Take a man sick of a disease which is neither severe and desperate nor yet altogether mild, but likely to be pronounced under wrong treatment, and suppose that he resolved to eat bread, and meat, or any other food that is beneficial to men in health, not much of it, but far less than he could have taken had he been well ; take again a man in health, with a constitution neither altogether weak nor altogether

[p. 27] strong, and suppose he were to eat one of the foods that would be beneficial and strength-giving to an ox or a horse, vetches or barley or something similar, not much of it, but far less than he could take. If the man in health did this he would suffer no less pain and danger than that sick man who took bread or barley-cake at a time when he ought not. All this goes to prove that this art of medicine, if research be continued on the same method, can all be discovered.