The genuine work of Hippocrates / translated from the Greek, with a preliminary discourse and annotations by Francis Adams.

Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The genuine work of Hippocrates / translated from the Greek, with a preliminary discourse and annotations by Francis Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    by god. For it is the divinity which purifies and sanctifies the greatest of offences and the most wicked, and which proves our protection from them. And we mark out the boundaries of the temples and the groves of the gods, so that no one may pass them unless he be pure, and when we enter them we are sprinkled with holy water, not as being polluted, but as laying aside any other pollution which we formerly had. And thus it appears to me to hold, with regard to purifications. But this disease seems to me to be nowise more divine than others ; but it has its nature such as other diseases have, and a cause whence it originates, and its nature and cause are divine only just as much as all others are, and it is curable no less than the others, unless when, from length of time, it is confirmed, and has become stronger than the remedies applied. Its origin is hereditary, like that of other diseases. ^ For if a phlegmatic person be born of a phlegmatic, and a bilious of a bilious, and a phthisical of a phthisical, and one having spleen disease, of another having disease of the spleen, what is to hinder it from happening that where the father and mother were subject to this disease, certain of their ofi'spring should be so affected also ? As the semen comes from all parts of the body, healthy par- ticles will come from healthy parts, and unhealthy from un- healthy parts.^ And another great proof that it is in nothing more divine than other diseases is, that it occurs in those who are of a phlegmatic constitution, but does not attack the bilious. Yet, if it were more divine than the others, this disease ought to befall all alike, and make no distinction between the bilious and phlegmatic. But in them, the brain is the cause of this affection, as it is of other very great diseases, and in what manner and from what cause it is formed, I will now plainly declare. The brain of man, as in all other animals, is double, and a thin membrane {meninx) divides it through the middle, and therefore the pain is not always in the same part of the head; for sometimes it is situated in either side, and some- times the whole is affected; and veins run towards it from all ' That epilepsy is often hereditary, is admitted by our best authorities in modern times, as Zacutus Lusitanus (Prax. ad Mir., i, 36), Stahl (de Haired. Dispos. ad Var Affect.), Boerhaave (Aphor. 1075), M. Esquirol, and Dr. Copland (Dictionary of Practical Medicine, under Epilepsy, p. 789). ^ See, in Uke manner, On Airs, Waters, &c., § 15.