It is extraordinary how he could have been so emancipated from dogmas and theories of all sorts.

He laid down the fundamental proposition, and acted upon it, that "all disease could be described as natural history." To do him justice we must remember, as Dr.John Brown says, "in the midst of what a mass of errors and prejudices, of theories actively mischievous, he was placed, at a time when the mania of hypothesis was at its height, and when the practical part of his art was overrun and stultified by vile and silly nostrums" ("Horae Subsecivae," Vol.

I, 4th ed., Edinburgh, 1882, p.

40).
Listen to what he says upon the method of the study of medicine: "In writing therefore, such a natural history of diseases, every merely philosophical hypothesis should be set aside, and the manifest and natural phenomena, however minute, should be noted with the utmost exactness.

The usefulness of this procedure cannot be easily overrated, as compared with the subtle inquiries and trifling notions of modern writers, for can there be a shorter, or indeed any other way of coming at the morbific causes, or discovering the curative indications than by a certain perception of the peculiar symptoms?
By these steps and helps it was that the father of physic, the great Hippocrates, came to excel, his theory being no more than an exact description or view of nature.