Empiric school
The Empiric school of
Doctrines
The Empiric school said that it was necessary to understand the evident causes of disease, but considered the inquiry after the hidden causes and natural actions to be fruitless, because
They said that medicine, in its infancy, was deduced from experiments; for the sick, in a time when there were no physicians, had either taken food in the first days of their illness, or had abstained, and that the illness was more quickly alleviated in one group than the other. This and other instances occurring daily were observed by people diligent enough to realize which method was best to cure particular conditions, and hence the art of medicine arose. Medicine was not invented in consequence of reasoning, but that theory was sought after the discovery of medicine.
They asked, too, whether reason prescribed the same as experience, or something different: if the same, then it is not necessary; if different, then mischievous. Initially there was a necessity to examine
What matters is not what causes, but what cures the condition. It does not matter why a concoction works, only that it does work. Nor is it necessary to know how we
They supported their opinions in favour of experience with the famous "Tripod of Medicine":
- Observation: The observations which the patient had made in the course of the illness concerning the course of the disease and results of any treatments.
- History: A written collection of observations made by others.
- Analogy: When treating a new illness, selecting a plan of treatment by comparing it with a known disease which most resembled it.
See also
- Dogmatic school – School of medicine in ancient Greece and Rome
- Methodic school – School of medicine in ancient Greece and Rome
References
- ^ Heinrich von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria: Edition, Translation Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. xiii)
- William Smith, (1857), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, pages 401-3
External links
- Aulus Cornelius Celsus, On Medicine, Prooemium