A keen observer and an active practitioner, his views of disease, thus hastily sketched, dominated the profession for twenty-five centuries; indeed, echoes of his theories are still heard in the schools, and his very words are daily on our lips.

If asked what was the great contribution to medicine of Hippocrates and his school we could answer--the art of careful observation.
In the Hippocratic writings is summed up the experience of Greece to the Golden Age of Pericles.

Out of philosophy, out of abstract speculation, had come a way of looking at nature for which the physicians were mainly responsible, and which has changed forever men's views on disease.
Medicine broke its leading strings to religion and philosophy--a tottering, though lusty, child whose fortunes we are to follow in these lectures.

I have a feeling that, could we know more of the medical history of the older races of which I spoke in the first lecture, we might find that this was not the first-born of Asklepios, that there had been many premature births, many still-born offspring, even live-births--the products of the fertilization of nature by the human mind; but the record is dark, and the infant was cast out like Israel in the chapter of Isaiah.

But the high-water mark of mental achievement had not been reached by the great generation in which Hippocrates had labored.