Note 689 — Chapter LXVIII · SOKRATES.

This same tendency, to break off from the vague aggregate then conceived as physics, is discernible in the Hippokratic treatises, and even in the treatise De Antiquâ Medicinâ, which M. Littré places first in his edition, and considers to be the production of Hippokratês himself, in which case it would be contemporary with Sokratês. On this subject of authorship, however, other critics do not agree with him: see the question examined in his vol. i, ch. xii, p. 295, seq.

Hippokratês, if he be the author, begins by deprecating the attempt to connect the study of medicine with physical or astronomical hypothesis (c. 2), and he farther protests against the procedure of various medical writers and sophists, or philosophers, such as Empedoklês, who set themselves to make out “what man was from the beginning, how he began first to exist, and in what manner he was constructed,” (c. 20). This does not belong, he says, to medicine, which ought indeed to be studied as a comprehensive whole, but as a whole determined by and bearing reference to its own end: “You ought to study the nature of man; what he is with reference to that which he eats and drinks, and to all his other occupations or habits, and to the consequences resulting from each:” ὅ,τί ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος πρὸς τὰ ἐσθιόμενα καὶ πινόμενα, καὶ ὅ,τι πρὸς τὰ ἄλλα ἐπιτηδεύματα, καὶ ὅ,τι ἀφ᾽ ἑκάστου ἑκάστῳ συμβήσεται.

The spirit, in which Hippokratês here approaches the study of medicine, is exceedingly analogous to that which dictated the innovation of Sokratês in respect to the study of ethics. The same character pervades the treatise, De Aëre, Locis et Aquis, a definite and predetermined field of inquiry, and the Hippokratic treatises generally.