He is healthy when they are in proper proportion between one another as regards mixture and force and quantity, and when they are well mingled together; he becomes sick when one of these is diminished or increased in amount, or is separated in the body from its proper mixture, and not properly mingled with all the others." No words could more clearly express the views of disease which, as I mentioned, prevailed until quite recent years.

The black bile, melancholy, has given us a great word in the language, and that we have not yet escaped from the humoral pathology of Hippocrates is witnessed by the common expression of biliousness--"too much bile"-- or "he has a touch of the liver." The humors, imperfectly mingled, prove irritant in the body.

They are kept in due proportion by the innate heat which, by a sort of internal coction gradually changes the humors to their proper proportion.

Whatever may be the primary cause of the change in the humors manifesting itself in disease, the innate heat, or as Hippocrates terms it, the nature of the body itself, tends to restore conditions to the norm; and this change occurring suddenly, or abruptly, he calls the "crisis," which is accomplished on some special day of the disease, and is often accompanied by a critical discharge, or by a drop in the body temperature.

The evil, or superabundant, humors were discharged and this view of a special materies morbi, to be got rid of by a natural processor a crisis, dominated pathology until quite recently.
Hippocrates had a great belief in the power of nature, the vis medicatrix naturae, to restore the normal state.