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ON THE NATURAL FACULTIES Book I
PART 13
[p. 67]
Nor is Hippocrates the only one who knows this to be so, whilst those who take experience alone as their starting-point
The Empiricists. cf. Introduction, p. xiii.
know otherwise; they,
as well as all physicians who are engaged in the practice of medicine, are of this opinion. Asclepiades, however, is an exception; he would hold it a betrayal of his assumed "elements"
His ὄρκοι or momlecules.
to confess the truth about such matters. For if a single drug were to be discovered which attracted such and such a humour only, there would obviously be danger of the opinion gaining ground that there is in every body
he does not say "organized" or "living" body; inanimate things were also thougth to posses "natures"; cf. p. 2, note 1.
a faculty which attracts its own particular quality. He therefore says that safflower,
Carthamus tinctorius.
the Cnidian berry,
Daphne Gnidium.
and Hippophaes,
Euphorbia acanthothamnos.
do not draw phlegm from the body, but actually make it. Moreover, he holds that the flower and scales of bronze, and burnt bronze itself, and germander,
Teucrium chamaedrys.
and wild mastich
Atractylis gummifera.
dissolve the body into water, and that dropsical patients derive benefit from these substances, not because they are purged by them, but because they are rid of substances which actually help to increase the disease; for, if the medicine does not evacuate
the dropsical fluid contained in the body, but generates it, it aggravates the condition further. Moreover, scammony, according to the Asclepiadean argument, not only fails to evacuate the bile from the bodies of jaundiced subjects, but actually turns the useful blood into bile, and dissolves the body; in fact it does all manner of evil and increases the disease.
And yet this drug may be clearly seen to do good to numbers of people! "Yes," says he, "they derive
