The Complete Works of Claudius Galen, Vol. 18 Pt. 2

seems, but what accords with the author’s opinion, even if it happens to be false. Now, Hippocrates appears in no one of his own writings to have ever attributed the cause of disease to the gods, seeing that he even explained in his work On Regimen in Acute Diseases—a treatise that is indeed among those acknowledged as genuine—the reason why the ancients called those whom they did by a certain name, "the smitten" (blētoi). Furthermore, in the work On the Sacred Disease, he has written at length to refute those who think that diseases are caused by the gods. Therefore, we should not consider either epilepsy or love to be a divine disease; for although some, assuming it to be so, have recorded a true history—as Erasistratus discovered, that the king’s son was ill on account of love—they did not teach that love was divine, nor was it called so by Erasistratus, by Hippocrates, or by any other physician. Rather, the ancients include those who are emaciated, pale, sleepless, or even feverish due to erotic pretexts in that chapter of the treatise where they discuss antecedent causes. And since...