[p. 144]
enable him to identify a patient for himself. In
fact he rarely appears to be writing for a public ;
in the clinical histories especially one feels that the
only object is private information.
If the clinical histories are rough notes of this
character it becomes plain why they vary in fulness
of detail. The plan generally adopted is to give a
daily bulletin, or at least to notice the critical days,
but if the patient was not visited every day and
the attendants did not report anything striking,
gaps would occur such as we actually do find. An
editor writing for a public would either have made
these gaps less obvious or else have explained them.
But the most striking feature of this work is its
devotion to truth. The constitutions are strictly
limited to descriptions of the weather which preceded
or accompanied certain epidemics ; the clinical
histories are confined to the march of diseases to a
favourable or a fatal issue. Nothing irrelevant is
mentioned ; everything relevant is included.
Of the forty-two cases, twenty-five end in death,
very nearly 60 per cent. The writer's aim is not to
show how to cure--treatment is very rarely mentioned--but
to discover the sequences of symptoms, to set
down the successes and failures of Nature in her
efforts to expel the disease. The physician is acting,
not qua physician but qua scientist ; he has laid aside
the part of healer to be for a time a spectator looking
down on the arena, exercising that θεωρία which a
Greek held to be the highest human activity.
MSS. AND EDITIONS
The chief MSS. for Epidemics I. are A and V,
and for Epidemics III., V and D, supplemented for
