Greek Biology & Greek Medicine

‘If any person thinks the examination of the rest of the animal kingdom an unworthy task, he must hold in like disesteem the study of man. For no one can look at the primordia o...

With the death of Theophrastus about 287 B. C. pure biological science substantially disappears from the Greek world, and we get the same type of deterioration that is later enc...

Just as the Cnidians by dividing up diseases according to symptoms over-emphasized diagnosis and over-elaborated treatment, so the Coans laid very great force on prognosis and a...

‘While the young [fish] are small and not yet fully developed they have veins of great length which take the place of the navel-string, but as they grow and develop, these short...

When we turn from Aristotle’s observations in the department of natural history to his discussion of the actual mechanism of the living body, the subject now contained under the...

‘Growing bodies have the most innate heat; they therefore require the most nourishment, and if they have it not they waste. In the aged there is little heat, and therefore they...

‘A seed laid in the ground fills itself with the juices there contained, for the soil contains in itself juices of every nature for the nourishment of plants. Thus filled with j...

Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_ in the original text. Carat symbol “^” designates a superscript. Small capitals have been converted to SOLID...

This explanation is based on Aristotle’s fundamental doctrine of the opposite _qualities_, heat, cold, wetness, and dryness, that are found combined in pairs in the four _elemen...

The general state of health of the body was considered by the Hippocratists to depend on the distribution of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, whose mixture (_cras...

The work of Celsus of the end of the first century B. C. is a Latin treatise, probably translated from Greek, and is the surviving medical volume of a complete cyclopaedia of kn...