In his Introduction to Galen’s “On the Natural Faculties”, Arthur John Brock, the translator, noted that,

“If the work of Hippocrates be taken as representing the foundation upon which the edifice of historical Greek medicine was reared, then the work of Galen, who lived some six hundred years later, may be looked upon as the summit or apex of the same edifice. Galen’s merit is to have crystallised or brought to a focus all the best work of the Greek medical schools which had preceded his own time. It is essentially in the form of Galenism that Greek medicine was transmitted to after ages.”

And perhaps one can say, below that foundation, an ancient admonition to the medical practitioners,

“Be [as] wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”

To Hippocrates,

“a disease was essentially a process, one and indivisible, and thus his practical problem was essentially one of prognosis, “what will be the natural course of this disease, if left to itself?””

And so,

“Observation taught Hippocrates to place unbounded faith in the recuperative powers of the living organism —in what we sometimes call nowadays the ‘vis medicatrix Naturae’ [written in 1916, so, what we would now call “the healing power of nature” and in Tibb as “physis” or “tabiya”]. His observation was that even with a very considerable “abnormality” of environmental stress the organism, in the large majority of cases, manages eventually by its own inherent powers to adjust itself to the new conditions. “Merely give Nature a chance,” said the father of medicine in effect, “and most diseases will cure themselves.” And accordingly, his treatment was mainly directed towards “giving Nature a chance.””

Image

"Clorion"/Scan by NLM [Public domain]