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The ethical value of such a declaration could not escape the attention even of a Byzantine formalist, and it is interesting to observe that in our oldest Greek manuscript of the Hippocratic text, dating from the tenth century, this magnificent passage is headed by the words 'from the oath of Hippocrates according as it may be sworn by a Christian. Rome Urbinas 64, fo. 116.
A general decay of the spirit is reflected in the medical as in the literary products of the time, and we never again feel that elevation of a beautiful and calmly righteous presence that breathes through the Hippocratic collection and gives it a peculiar aroma. We shall pass over the general course of later Greek medicine with great rapidity.
When we consider how even in later centuries biology was linked with medicine, and how powerful and fundamental was the influence of the Hippocratic writings, not only on their immediate successors in antiquity, but also on the Middle Ages and right into the nineteenth century, we shall recognize the significance of these developments.
In the dry atmosphere the decay of vegetation was too rapid for the slow hectic which overtakes an Eastern landscape, or else Nature was too practical for such thin disguises. She merely turned the Hippocratic face to the spectator, with the old diagnosis of death in her sharp, contracted features. In the contemplation of such a prospect there was little to excite any but a morbid fancy.
These wonderful truths, with other wisdom of the ancients, were lost in the spiritual darkness of the Middle Ages. Modern medicine looks upon these claims and teachings of the Hippocratic School as "superstition without any foundation in fact."
The method of the Hippocratic writers is that known to-day as the 'inductive'. Without the vast scientific heritage that is in our own hands, with only a comparatively small number of observations drawn from the Coan and neighbouring schools, surrounded by all manner of bizarre oriental religions in which no adequate relation of cause and effect was recognized, and above all constantly urged by the exuberant genius for speculation of that Greek people in the midst of whom they lived and whose intellectual temptations they shared, they remain nevertheless, for the most part, patient observers of fact, sceptical of the marvellous and the unverifiable, hesitating to theorize beyond the data, yet eager always to generalize from actual experience; calm, faithful, effective servants of the sick.
The most important of the Cnidian doctrines were drawn up in a series of Sentences or Aphorisms, and these, it appears, inculcated a treatment along Egyptian lines of the symptom or at most the disease, rather than the patient, a statement borne out by the contents of the gynaecological works of probable Cnidian origin included in the so-called 'Hippocratic Collection'. A few names of Cnidian physicians have, moreover, come down to us with titles of their works, and a later statement that they practised anatomy.
Coupled with this distortion of the face, this Hippocratic smile, or 'risus sardonicus, as the old writers called it, what conclusion would it suggest to your mind?" "Death from some powerful vegetable alkaloid," I answered, "some strychnine-like substance which would produce tetanus." "That was the idea which occurred to me the instant I saw the drawn muscles of the face.
The first physicians in Rome were Greek slaves. Of these was Asclepiades, who enjoyed the friendship of Cicero. It is from him that the popular medical theories as to the "pores" have descended. He was the inventor of the shower-bath. Celsus wrote a work on medicine which takes almost equal rank with the Hippocratic writings.
Much more important, however, for subsequent biological development than such observations on the nature and habits of animals, is the service that the Hippocratic physicians rendered to Anatomy and to Physiology, departments in which the structure of man and of the domesticated animals stands apart from that of the rest of the animal kingdom.
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