and understood the care of surgical patients. The efficiency of Greek surgery shows that the absence of certain specific knowledge and consequent practices now deemed essential, does not preclude wise and successful treatment19
Among the Hippocratic qualities which deserve the gratitude of mankind, the first place should be given to the spirit and method of this great physician and his school, which stood fast by observation and experience, guided and systematized by large and consistent views of the actual conduct of disease. August and beneficent was the influence of this principle and method through the following six hundred years of Greek and Roman-Hellenistic medicine, closing in the work of Galen. Advance fifteen centuries further in the course of time and chequered progress, and such great physicians as Sydenham (1624-1689) and Boerhaave (1668-1738), wearied with conflicting and all-unproven medical theories, will—like many others who have been fain to do so even to our own day—be found reaching back to the method of Hippocrates.
Moreover, if the four humors have been laughed out of court, the cognate principle of
[37]
