Physiologia Medica

to bear, to rule also, and to signify governing. Thus in Homer: "Father Zeus, healing king of rulers," original: Ζεῦ πάτερ ἰήϊε ἄναξ μεδέων also "the healers of the first things and the rulers." original: ἀρχέων ἰητῆρες ἠδὲ μεδέοντες But just as ancient Medicine was Empirical based on experience, so Princes and Kings strove to cultivate, preserve, and propagate it through singular observation. From this, a greater, almost royal dignity seems to have been added to the Craftsmen. It was so much so that among the Locrians, it was a capital offense for a sick person to have drunk wine without the physician's order. Therefore, whether from the excellence of the subject body (since nothing is more desirable than health) or from the excellence of its practitioners, the word mederion ruling/guarding and "To Heal" original: Mederi, otherwise a general term, began to be specific. Following the imitation of Aristotle, who in the fifth book of the Ethics derives various meanings of Justice from the various meanings of the Just and the Unjust, we also, having established the etymology of Medicine, will derive the diverse meanings and types of Medicine from the diversity of Healing itself.

TO HEAL original: MEDERI is therefore TO ACT, and Medication is the very Action of healing. It is like a certain perfection of something imperfect, either by its own nature: since it attains the limit of its perfection through the ministry of art, which it could not obtain from nature (as when a wild and forest creature is tamed, or the raw is ripened); or by the will and institution of man, whose uses the thing must serve. Thus many things are perfect in their own kind, but imperfect with respect to use. These require medication in a general sense, through whose ministry they may be perfected—that is, adapted to human use. Such is the division of a solid, the bending of the straight, the watering of wine, and its conversion into

vinegar, or the timely preparation of food.

This medical ACTION belongs to the Agent, who is the physician, equipped with a certain habitus disposition or skill. For he has a certain Goal for which he acts, a Mode of acting, and certain Instruments through which he acts. He also has a certain Subject, whether it is considered materially—and is, for example, a Human, Water, or Wood—or formally, insofar as it can receive and suffer an action. This is so that what was not inside may be introduced, or certainly that what was inside may be removed, altered, or preserved.

That this medical habitus skill is not just one thing can be shown by the examination of individual causes. For:

The Subject of the medical skill.

If we look at the Subject of medication, it is surely such that it can suffer from another in any way. This is a natural Being, whether simple or mixed, perfect or imperfect, animate or inanimate. Thus when Aglaonice, daughter of Hegetor the King of the Thessalians, said she could draw down the Moon with her songs, the Thessalian women healed the laboring Moon with the clanging of basins, as Pliny testifies in book 2, chapter 12. The Farmer heals the Earth itself when he removes its hardness by plowing and harrowing, or its dryness by irrigation. Empedocles of Agrigentum healed the pestilential Air by hanging the hides of donkeys from the summits of mountains (from which he deserved to be called the Wind-Stayer original: Κωλυσανέμας). Hippocrates of Cos healed the air by the burning of forests. We mitigate and ward off the coldness of the air with a bright hearth and heated rooms, and we ease the heat by ventilation. That supreme shepherd and physician of the human race eases the sharp cold in Summer and tempers the rigor of the cold with Heat, as the Psalmist says. Bitter waters