in the benefit of the patient.  Empiricism, experience, the collection of facts, the evidence of the senses, the avoidance of philosophical speculations, were the distinguishing features of Hippocratic medicine.  One of the most striking contributions of Hippocrates is the recognition that diseases are only part of the processes of nature, that there is nothing divine or sacred about them.  With reference to epilepsy, which was regarded as a sacred disease, he says, “It appears to me to be no wise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from which it originates like other affections; men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance.”  And in another place he remarks that each disease has its own nature, and that no one arises without a natural cause.  He seems to have been the first to grasp the conception of the great healing powers of nature.  In his long experience with the cures in the temples, he must have seen scores of instances in which the god had worked the miracle through the vis medicatrix naturae; and to the shrewd wisdom of his practical suggestions in treatment may be attributed in large part the extraordinary vogue which the great Coan has enjoyed for twenty-five centuries.  One may appreciate the veneration with which the Father of Medicine was regarded by the attribute “divine” which was usually attached to his name.  Listen to this for directness and honesty of speech taken from the work on the joints characterized by Littre as “the great surgical monument of antiquity”:  “I have written this down deliberately, believing it is valuable to learn of unsuccessful experiments, and to know the causes of their non-success.”

The note of freedom is not less remarkable throughout the Hippocratic writings, and it is not easy to understand how a man brought up and practicing within the precincts of a famous AEsculapian temple could have divorced himself so wholly from the superstitions and vagaries of the cult.  There are probably grounds for Pliny’s suggestion that he benefited by the receipts written in the temple, registered by the sick cured of any disease.  “Afterwards,” Pliny goes on to remark in his characteristic way, “hee professed that course of Physicke which is called Clinice Wherby physicians found such sweetnesse that afterwards there was no measure nor end of fees,” (’Natural History,’ XXIX, 1).  There is no reference in the Hippocratic writings to divination; incubation sleep is not often mentioned, and charms, incantations or the practice of astrology but rarely.  Here and there we do find practices which jar upon modern feeling, but on the whole we feel in reading the Hippocratic writings nearer to their spirit than to that of the Arabians or of the many writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries A. D. And it is not only against the thaumaturgic powers that the Hippocratic writings protested, but they express an equally active reaction against the excesses and defects