Book 2
6
I know that on this point someone may question me:— if there are such sure signs of approaching death, how is it that patients who have been deserted by their medical attendants sometimes recover? And rumour has spread it about that some have revived whilst being carried out to burial. Democritus, indeed, a man justly renowned, even held that the signs of life having ended, upon which practitioners had relied, were not sufficiently sure; much more did he not admit that there could be any sure signs of approaching death. In answer to these I shall not even assert that some signs, stated as approximately certain, often deceive inexperienced practitioners, but not good ones; for instance Asclepiades, when he met the funeral procession, recognized that a man who was being carried out to burial was alive; and it is not primarily a fault of the art if there is a fault on the part of its professor. But I shall more modestly suggest that the art of medicine is conjectural, and such is the characteristic of a conjecture, that though it answers more frequently, yet it sometimes deceives. A sign therefore is not to be rejected if it is deceptive in scarcely one out of a thousand cases, since it holds good in countless patients. I state this, not merely in connexion with noxious signs, but as to salutary signs as well; seeing that hope is disappointed now and again, and that the patient dies whom the practitioner at first deemed safe; and further that measures proper for curing now and again make a change into something worse. Nor, in the face of such a variety of temperaments, can human frailty avoid this. Nevertheless the medical art is to be relied upon, which more often, and in by far the greater number of patients, benefits the sick. It should not be ignored, however, that it is rather in acute diseases that signs, whether of recovery or of death, may be fallacious.
