remedies are competent to cure them"; and "Diseases are not cured by eloquence, but by remedial agents."
Among the comments made by Celsus with regard to the differences which distinguished the Dogmatists from the Empirics we find the following statement: "The two sects employed the same remedies and pursued very much the same course of treatment, but their reasonings about such matters were different."
Modern physicians will, at first thought, be disposed to wonder how men as clever as many of these physicians were could have split up into separate and more or less antagonistic sects because of such apparently trivial differences of opinion. It must be remembered, however, that these men were groping in comparative darkness whenever they tried to advance their knowledge of pathology, and that in this imperfect light many things seemed of much greater importance than they appeared to be in the brighter light of later centuries. It is only fair, therefore, to withhold criticism and to ask ourselves whether this strong desire on the part of those men to advance their knowledge of pathology—a desire which manifested itself in the formation of sects—was not in reality an evidence of the great vitality of Greek medicine on Roman soil in those early centuries.
The remarks made above with regard to the Dogmatists and the Empirics apply in a general manner to the sects known as the Methodists and the Eclectics, a sufficiently full account of which has been given in the preceding chapter.[1]
- ↑ The term "dogmatists" is also employed by some authorities to designate those physicians who laid great stress upon the importance of following the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen.
