Kitap 1
pr
None the less the foregoing statements ought not to be passed by as if they did not admit of controversy. For Erasistratus himself has affirmed that diseases were not produced by such causes, since other persons, and even the same person at different times, were not rendered feverish by them. Further, certain practitioners of our time, following, as they would have it appear, the authority of Themison, contend that there is no cause whatever, the knowledge of which has any bearing on treatment: they hold that it is sufficient to observe certain general characteristics of diseases; that of these there are three classes, one a constriction, another a flux, the third a mixture. For the sick at one time excrete too little, at another time too much; again, from one part too little, from another too much; and these classes of diseases are sometimes acute, sometimes chronic, at times on the increase, at times constant, at times diminishing. Once it has been recognized, then, which it is of these, if the body is constricted, it has to be relaxed; if suffering from a flux, that has to be controlled; if a mixed lesion, the more severe malady must be countered first. Moreover, there must be treatment of one kind for acute diseases, another kind for chronic ones, another for increasing, stationary, or for those already tending to recovery. They hold that the Art of Medicine consists of such observations; which they define as a sort of way, which they name μέθοδοσ, and maintain that medicine should examine those characteristics which diseases have in common. They do not want to be classed with reasoners from theory, nor with those who look to experience only; for in so naming themselves Methodici, they dissent from the former because they are unwilling that the Art should consist in conjecture about hidden things, and from the latter because they think that in the observation of experience there is little of an Art of Medicine.
