Turner's letter to a young physician. All these books very carefully I read, and to your reading add the best observations you can any where get, or make yourself. I writ down in the shortest manner, abstracts

of the most curious and useful things, especially the representations of nature; and refreshed my memory by often looking into my notebook. Every thing taken from nature is valuable. Hypothesis is entertaining rather than useful.
And when I was reading the history of diseases in the authors I have just mentioned, I looked into the antient Greek and Latin medical writers; for all their merit lies in this kind of history. Their pharmacy and anatomy is good for nothing. They scarce knew any thing of the human bodies, but from the dissections of other animals, took their descriptions. The great Vesalius in the beginning of the 16th century, was the first that taught physicians to study nature in dissecting human bodies; which was then considered by the church as a kind of sacrilege.(20)

As to chemistry, they had no

notion of it. It was not heard of till some hundred years after the latest of them. In botany they had made little progress. In short, as they knew little of botany;—nothing of chemistry; as their systems of natural philosophy and anatomy were false and unnatural, (and it is upon anatomy and natural philosophy, that physiology or the use of the parts is founded,) we can expect nothing from the antients upon these heads, but mere imaginations, or notions unsupported by observation or matter of fact. It is their history of diseases supports their character. Hippocrates, in particular, excels all others on this head: but this great man was not perfect even in this. Knowledge in nature is the daughter of time and experience. Many notions of the animal oeconomy were then absurd; and if Hippocrates was too wise to act always up to his theory, yet he could not be intirely free from its influence.

The names of the antient original greek medical writers are, Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Aritaeus, Galen, and Alexander. The latin writers of physic are, Celsus, Scribonius Largus, Caelius Aurelianus, Marcellus Empericus, Theodorus Priscianus, and Sextus Placitus. We have besides several collectors, as Oribasius, Aetius, Paulus Aeginita, &c. Nicander, the medical poet; and the fragments of Soranus, Rufus Ephesius, Zonorates, Vindicianus, Diocles Carystius, Cassius, and a few others: but all these may be looked into afterwards. The original authors are sufficient in the noviciate.
As to the latin medical writers, Celsus