Mysterious death mask. Death mask (unknown) What is a death mask on the face

Since ancient times, people have sought in various ways to look into the future and find out the date of their death. Some turned to cards, others went to psychics, palmists, astrologers and other masters of the occult sciences. But none of them could give one hundred percent predictions. Therefore, the information that the “formula of death” had allegedly been revealed became a contender for a real sensation.

Professor Evgeny Chernosvitov has been collecting death masks of great people for many years, which served as the impetus for a stunning discovery - after death, people's faces become absolutely symmetrical.

Paying attention to the symmetry of death masks, the professor decided to test his guesses on photographs of ordinary people. To do this, he placed a two-way mirror in the center of a photograph of a person so that it divided the image in half vertically. And one could see a face made up of two right and two left halves (in the photo and in the mirror).

As it turned out, this “mosaic” is significantly different from the original. And the “right” face is very different from the “left”. Having repeated his experiment with photographs of the same person taken at different periods of his life, Chernosvitov saw a certain trend.

If the faces of young and healthy people had a well-defined asymmetry, then with age it smoothed out, and the changes occurred in geometric progression. The closer a person's death, the more symmetrical his face became. The professor assures that on the basis of this he derived a certain formula that allows one to calculate the exact life expectancy of everyone. But he keeps it a secret.

At one time, working as a forensic expert, Evgeniy Vasilyevich had the opportunity to verify the correctness of his theory in practice. He saw bodies with completely healthy organs, and the cause of death remained unclear. Or, on the contrary, during the autopsy it was discovered that the person had almost rotted alive and was already several years away from dying, but did not die from illness. His time has just come.

At first glance, all this seems like another sensational fiction, but some real events make you believe in the “formula of death.”

One day, a professor gave a lecture to employees of one of the Altai colonies. Listeners enthusiastically experimented with their photographs and mirrors. After the lecture, one of the guards approached him. The young man was alarmed and confused.

As it turned out, his face was perfectly symmetrical. Chernosvitov, checking the security guard’s photo again, realized that he was not mistaken. And he tried to somehow console the guy, saying that this is all just a theory.

The professor left, and a few hours later he was informed that as soon as the guard left the hall where the lecture was taking place, one of the prisoners attacked him and mortally wounded him with a homemade knife. The formula worked!

If a person dies of an illness and his face acquires symmetry before death, then this can still be somehow explained from a physiological point of view. But the security guard's case illustrates that the formula works regardless of whether the death was natural or accidental. This means that symmetry is an indicator of any death. It turns out that a person’s fate is predetermined?

BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE FUTURE

It is known that the hemispheres of the human brain perform certain functions. For example, the left is responsible for human behavior and “looks” into the future, predicting the consequences of a particular action. And the right, which is responsible for emotions and feelings, looks for ways to solve problems in the past, analyzing similar situations that have already happened to a person. The present, according to the professor, is located exactly in the middle.

It is the past and the future that are reflected on the two sides of the human face. One has more experience, and the other has more hopes for the future, hence the asymmetry. When a person dies, the differences disappear, he remains forever in the present and goes into another world with a “single” face, which is imprinted on the symmetrical death mask.

FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED?

It would seem as simple as that: having photos from different years, everyone can determine the date of their departure. Actually this is not true. The formula itself exists, but there are no computer programs capable of performing the correct calculation yet. However, Chernosvitov claims that manually the formula works with one hundred percent accuracy.

However, it is unknown what social consequences should be expected if everyone can find out how many years their body is programmed for. After all, for most people, the prospect of such knowledge causes panic horror and can turn the rest of their lives into torture with the expectation of death. Unless such information about life reserve can be useful to doctors when prescribing a course of treatment for seriously ill patients.

By the way, many clairvoyants, fortune tellers, sorcerers, and psychics use their ability to capture the peculiarities of people’s asymmetry in predicting the future. So, a fairly famous portrait painter lives and works in Moscow, who can depict a person as he will be in a few years. The artist does not know about the “formula of death,” but for some reason he refuses some people, explaining that he “doesn’t see them at this age.”

But Evgeny Vasilyevich’s collection and the discovery associated with it allowed him to draw some very interesting conclusions. For example, when carefully studying the death masks of great people, he determined that only Suvorov and Dostoevsky were truly dead when a cast was taken from their faces, the rest were in the stage of clinical death.

The professor believes that almost everyone goes through this stage when they are between being and non-being, rethinking their path and saying goodbye to earthly life. And if there is an expression of peace on the face of the deceased, then he is satisfied with the results of his life.

THIS IS THE END OF THE TALE

Like any theory unconfirmed by science, the “death formula” has its adherents and opponents. Doctors and scientists find their explanation for the phenomenon of asymmetry.

Doctor of Technical and Psychological Sciences, Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences Anuashvili, based on his experience, assures that people are not only not always born with an asymmetrical face, but also have every chance of acquiring asymmetry in old age for some reason.

For example, with inflammation of the trigeminal nerve or after a stroke, when the balance of muscle tone on one side is disturbed. And facial proportions can change throughout life depending on heredity and living conditions.

Alexander Dubrov, professor, doctor of biological sciences, says almost the same thing: “The aging of the body is associated with biorhythms, the speed of metabolic processes, the life expectancy of various cells (blood, lymph, hormones, epithelial and bone tissue, etc.).

And they, in turn, depend on differences in the activity of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In this asymmetry, in my opinion, lies the answer to what Professor E.V. Chernosvitov discovered. As soon as the morphological asymmetry inherent in a person changes or disappears, degradation and death occur.”

Yuri Rogov, head of the department of pathological anatomy of the Belarusian Medical Academy, calls Chernosvitov’s theory uncertain. In his opinion, the symmetry that the author of the theory talks about is an approximate concept, and with a more accurate analysis, the presence of asymmetry can still be detected.

As for the “formula of death” itself, Doctor of Medical Sciences Oleg Zlobin suggests making calculations at the genetic level, analyzing hereditary diseases and the life expectancy of ancestors.

Whatever the truth, the “formula of death” is of great interest. Perhaps it can be called the “mask theory”. Each of us is born without a mask. We put it on only at the first glimpses of self-awareness, that is, in the second year of life.

And then we change it depending on emotions, mood and other circumstances. Death removes all this husk from the human face when consciousness fades. One mask remains - a death mask, expressing, according to Evgeniy Chernosvitov, spiritual symmetry.

PRIVATE BUSSINESS

Evgeniy CHERNOSVITOV - professor, international expert in social medicine. Consults scientific centers in London, Dublin, Lyon, member of the Presidium of the Criminological Council (Lübeck, Germany). Author of over 200 scientific papers. Collector of death masks of great people.

Remember, relatives of the deceased often say that he or she became prettier before death. And perhaps this is what lifted the spirits of the deceased before death. And the whole point is that death puts its mask on people. And he begins to apply it already a year before his death. You can more accurately recognize a mask within a year. I am the type of person who sees this “mask”. Death mask. And this happened after my grandfather died. Standing at his coffin, I was very scared. The dead man actually opened his eyes and looked at me. Everything inside me sank; I couldn’t breathe out of fear. Blood rushed to the back of my head, my vision darkened. I couldn’t speak for two days after that. Everyone thought that I was grieving for my grandfather, but I just really couldn’t say a word.
But I began to see what others don’t see.
And I also had a voice inside me. He spoke to me. Answered my questions. Now I knew in advance what would happen tomorrow, in a month, in a year. Visions and pictures appear in my head. And at first I thought I was going crazy. But my head was thinking clearly and clearly. Like never before. And I began to learn to live with it.
The first time was when a drug addict, a neighbor of my mother’s friend, passed us at the bus stop.
I saw on his face something like light yellow wax or something. And it was, how can I put it correctly, dense or something.
“Mom, he’s almost dead,” I said, nodding at him.
- Of course, drug addicts are all potential dead.
- No, mom, he will die tomorrow.
She smiled, didn’t believe it. I didn't insist. A week ago I would not have believed myself. The next evening I did my homework. Mom came up to me:
- Sash, how did you understand that that uncle would die?
I couldn't keep it all to myself any longer. I told her about everything. About the death of my grandfather, about his eyes, about his voice and visions. And... about the death mask. I cried and felt better. Then he added that he saw a death mask on a neighbor today. The neighbor was buried a few days later. Then my father's relative died. I was at the funeral. I saw three more masks on the faces of those present. The first is on the face of the deceased's husband. The second is on a guy, I don’t know who he is to her. The third is on the face of the deceased’s son, a young man in his thirties. Within a month, everyone died. Young man in the dentist's chair. Sometimes I used the voice inside myself. For example, if my mother was going somewhere far away on business, I could stop her if the trip was empty and pointless.
He advised me when it would be best to do it.
One day my mother’s friend came to visit us. She began to talk loudly about how two gold rings were missing from her. A vision appeared in my head: two rings in the kitchen, on the windowsill. They are taken from there by a short woman. The rings were found on that woman. Mom's friend is delighted. She began to bring friends to me, and for trivial reasons. I refused to go out to them.
Mom stopped letting them in. My mother took me to doctors. Verdict - HEALTHY! But this happens with strong emotional excitement.
At school I began to use my abilities. I knew for sure whether they would ask me in class or not. And if he wasn’t ready, he grabbed his stomach and ran to the toilet. I passed the Unified State Exam easily. One day after the holidays I came to school and saw a mask of death on my friend’s face. We were four friends. Me, Pashok, Artyom and Lyokha. I knew that Lyokha had no more than a week to live. That day I wanted to cheat death. And I couldn’t think of anything better than inviting him to my home. We spent the whole day hanging out on the Internet. Were playing. I didn’t want to let him go, but his mother called him and told him to go home. I called him a taxi, although it was not far away. But a friend ran into the store across the street. His mother asked. He was hit by a car. Drunk Driver.
Lyokha was buried by the whole school. I cried again. DEATH CANNOT BE CHEATED!!!
Lately I have begun to feel death in the distance. I am now a technical school student. Recently I was walking along the corridor of my educational institution and suddenly something unpleasantly familiar made me go into the library. The librarian, a dear old lady, smiled warmly at me...
I bought her flowers and asked her to do all her most important things. She was moved, shed a tear, then hugged me and whispered: “I understand you, Sash.” She died this morning. NO! I will never get used to death.
I posted this story on the same site, but I presented it poorly.
I’m going to Moscow soon to see the famous psychiatrist and criminologist, Professor Mikhail V. I agreed to take his tests.
And I also feel a lot of death, a lot. There will be a terrible cataclysm. But not everyone will die. I often go to church, I ask GOD to return everything to me as it was before, to cancel the cataclysms and SAVE ALL PEOPLE..
GOD is silent...

This symptom got its name from the well-known scientist and physician Hippocrates. The mask can only appear when a person is very sick and serious processes are occurring in the body, not for the better.

What is a symptom?

The Hippocratic mask is a set of certain changes to which someone has been suffering from some serious illness for a long time. This concept would be more correctly classified as symptoms, because it is by changes in the face that a doctor can often determine the presence of an illness, carry out the necessary diagnostics and prescribe timely treatment. Such traits can appear in a person who has diseases in the abdominal organs, suffers from exhaustion or prolonged insomnia, and they can also be harbingers of imminent death.

Reasons for the appearance of the mask

The Hippocrates mask was first described in the 5th century in the works of a scientist, where he discussed in more detail the topic of facial changes, which may indicate improper distribution of blood and lymph in the body. He also said that all this could indicate intoxication, because it is during this period that the inflammatory process begins to develop.

The mask can appear in many ways, but the main ones are listed below:

If all the diseases listed above are absent, then the appearance of a mask on the face may indicate that the person will soon die, since Hippocrates gave another definition of it - as a symptom indicating an imminent death.

Main characteristics of the Hippocrates mask

The Hippocrates mask has its own characteristics, so before identifying it on a person’s face, it is worth paying attention to some of its characteristics:

1. First of all, it changes, it becomes inexpressive, in some cases even motionless, the eyes can look at one point for a long time.
2. The cheeks and eyes become sunken, and the cheekbones begin to appear clearly.
3. When a patient simply loses weight due to a disease, a shine remains in his eyes, but with the Hippocratic mask there is none, his eyes become dull.
4. It is worth paying attention to the cornea: it becomes cloudy, and a veil falls over the eyes.
5. The lips turn white, and the corners of the mouth droop down, facial expressions lose their attractiveness, while a person’s lips may be too cold and dry, and ulcers form due to the skin bursting.
6. The Hippocrates mask is a symptom in which the complexion necessarily changes: it becomes greenish, in some cases even leaden, the blush disappears forever.
7. The patient's lower jaw may sag and the nose may become pointed.
8. If you touch the patient’s ears, you can feel how cold they are, and the lobes will look protruding.
9. The skin on the face seems stretched, while it is too dry to the touch, peeling appears.
10. Small beads of sweat may appear on the forehead, but the skin will not be moisturized.

What does a mask look like before death?

If the Hippocratic mask appeared before death, then all of the above characteristics of this symptom can be supplemented by the signs of the patient beginning to take on a slightly different character, and all his vital functions gradually fade away. It is not at all difficult to distinguish, since a person may experience trembling throughout the body, there is a problem with breathing, it may become hoarse, the pulse slows down, the body temperature decreases, and sometimes it can immediately rise to 40 degrees, and feelings begin to disappear. This condition can last from 2 minutes to two days.

How does the face change during illness?

If you pay attention to the signs of the disease in time, you can try to cure the disease. As a rule, an experienced doctor will immediately look at the patient who came to see him and begin to diagnose health problems. When a person has a haggard face and a dull expression, his eyes are deeply sunken and there is no shine in them, and his skin has become gray in color, then it is quite logical to suspect problems in the internal organs.

In cases where the Hippocratic mask appears, the face immediately begins to change and lose weight. After examining the patient, the doctor will definitely pay attention to constant changes in features over some time: if the symptoms that appeared on the first day only get worse, then in this case it is necessary to take urgent measures to eliminate the disease causing the mask.

Diagnosis of the disease

The Hippocratic mask may not appear immediately after the first manifestations of the disease. But as soon as a person begins to feel health problems, he should immediately seek help from a specialist, because in this way the patient has a greater chance of saving his life.

Diagnosis will help to avoid complications, especially if the Hippocratic mask has already begun to appear. The description of all symptoms and the observation of a doctor refer to superficial studies, so additional emergency diagnostics may be prescribed:

1. The doctor takes a medical history and performs a physical examination.
2. Laboratory blood tests are mandatory, as this method can tell a lot about the inflammatory process in the abdominal organs.
3. As a rule, the doctor prescribes fluoroscopy and ultrasound of the abdominal organs.
4. To obtain a complete picture of the disease, the patient will also need to undergo endoscopy and laparoscopy of the peritoneum.

Once all the results are received, the doctor will be able to begin treatment and prescribe immediate surgery.

Elimination of the Hippocrates symptom

Don't think that the mask can only appear before death; in fact, this is not the case. It can occur with the manifestations of various diseases, and in many cases a person can get better if measures are taken in time to eliminate the underlying disease. When wondering what the Hippocratic mask is, what it really is, we can safely say that this is a symptom that requires special attention and study, because in many cases the patient’s life depends on it. If it occurs after a disease has been identified in the abdominal cavity, then, as a rule, urgent surgery may be required.

If the symptom arose as a result of insomnia, which led to exhaustion of the body, you should immediately contact a psychotherapist who will carry out psychocorrection and be able to prescribe suitable medications.

Cachexia can also be treated, this requires the help of a specialist, he selects a special diet, prescribes medications that can restore metabolism in the body, and also requires careful care.

What does the symptom look like in the photo?

As the disease progresses, the Hippocratic mask may begin to appear (you can see the photo in the article). It is clearly visible that a person’s body may not be completely exhausted, but all the signs of the disease may well be on the face. You should not immediately panic, as the prognosis can be quite favorable if you pay attention to the main symptoms in time and seek help. The doctor will help identify the disease and provide timely assistance. The mask occurs only if the pathologies are really serious. But with timely assistance, the patient can survive.

How to prevent the appearance of the Hippocrates mask?

To prevent the Hippocrates mask from appearing, you should follow a few simple rules. First of all, it is important to remember that this symptom appears when the disease progresses to If a person consults a specialist at the first symptoms of the disease, the disease can be recognized at the initial stage, which means that there will be a chance to avoid long treatment, which may require surgery interventions.

Death mask.

I first learned about this phenomenon somewhere in the 70s from the front-line memoirs of military intelligence officer Vasily Kurochkin. One day, after a serious concussion, he discovered that he had a strange and ominous gift: to foresee the death of those whom he sent on a mission.

Kurochkin writes: “It happened that when I sent another intelligence officer on a mission, I looked at his face and immediately determined: this one is not a tenant! And I’ve never made a mistake.”

Intuition is intuition, but that means there was something on the face of the person going on reconnaissance that immediately caught the eye.

Of course, having made sure that his foresight was one hundred percent accurate, Kurochkin somehow tried to change the fate of the person being sent to death. After all, an intelligence officer is not a saboteur, he must definitely return and report, and sending a suicide bomber is pointless. And you can’t explain anything to anyone - no one will believe it anyway. And seeing the “mask of death” on the face of the next candidate, he tried by all means to remove him from the task.

He sent one young guy to the rear under a far-fetched pretext. But he died from the explosion of a grenade from his own colleague, who accidentally pulled the pin. He sent another to accompany the general who had arrived at the front line (he did not see anything like that on the face of the person he was escorting). The guy was blown up by a mine, and the general only had his overcoat damaged by shrapnel. And only once did he manage to see how the death mask disappeared - an order was received from above to cancel the task.

EVIL FATE

I took note of this incident, but only 20 years later in one of the magazines I read about a similar phenomenon, which I will reproduce here from memory.

An American woman with psychic abilities approached the elevator. Its doors opened, and she saw with horror the “mask of death” on the faces of its passengers. She seemed petrified from surprise, and the elevator left without her. His cable broke and the brakes did not work. All the people in the elevator died. Unfortunately, the woman never explained what this notorious “death mask” looks like.

The cases described by Kurochkin lead to sad reflections on the predetermination of fate: no matter how he tried to intervene, his subordinates still died. But this is not entirely true: the “death mask” simply served as a sign that a person would soon die, and in this case his intervention was already, as it were, “programmed” in subsequent events. In any case, the woman, having received a warning, managed to avoid death.

In one of the articles, I talked about the St. Petersburg girl Olya Savchuk, who, having been hospitalized after an injury, discovered that she had a similar gift - to see someone who would soon die. One day she noticed with amazement that the figure of her roommate seemed to be split into two. And the next day her neighbor died during surgery. After this incident, she encountered similar cases several more times.

It seems that everything has become clear with the “death mask”, and even the corresponding hypothesis of its appearance was easy to create within the framework of occult ideas about the “subtle bodies” of man. At least the human “astral body” has predictive abilities, and, knowing about the impending death of the physical body, prepares to leave it. But, as we got to know other carriers of this phenomenon, everything turned out to be not so simple.

The American writer of the mid-19th century, Anne Duncan, received this ability after falling from a horse (nowadays, to do this you need to get hit by a car). Some time later, while walking with a young man named Mark, she, saying goodbye to him in front of her house, looked into his face and shuddered in horror: the pupils of his eyes disappeared, turning into holes filled with solid blackness.

Something happened? — the young man asked anxiously.

No, no, it’s okay,” Ann answered, letting go of his hand. She thought that this was some kind of obsession, because just recently, literally a minute ago, these were ordinary gray eyes.

Mark turned and walked along the street towards his house. Tormented by unaccountable anxiety, Anne called out to him, and when he returned, the same black abyss was blazing in his eyes. "Be careful!" — for some reason she said, in order to somehow explain why she called out to him. Alas, the young man did not heed this warning. In the evening of the same day, having looked into a tavern with a friend, he stood up for a girl who was being pestered by a drunken cowboy. He resolved the conflict in the traditional way: he grabbed a revolver from his holster and pumped three bullets into the offender. Then he jumped on his horse and was off.

Some time later, Anne, with even greater horror, discovered the same “death mask” on the face of her sick aunt - she died the next day. And twice more in her life the writer managed to encounter a similar phenomenon. The strange thing was that Anne encountered death more often than she had precognitions.

SHAVAN AND BLACK EYES

She was lucky: black eyes are far from the worst sight. Her compatriot, Anne Priestley, imagined the “mask of death” in the form of a grinning skull that appeared through the soft tissue of a person’s head. But this is not the worst thing: some owners of the phenomenon see the future dead man without a head at all. After such examples, the phenomenon looks very blissful in the form of a translucent shroud wrapping a person.

Unfortunately, the examples given are not enough to make any generalizations, although some common features do emerge. For example, in all cases known to me, excluding episodes during the war years, the owners of the gift were women. In almost all cases, the anomalous abilities manifested themselves after the injury, as did other psychic abilities.

The time from the fact of foresight to the fact of death is strictly individual and ranges from several hours to several days.

The “death mask” is observed not by ordinary vision, but, in occult terminology, by astral or mental vision. Alas, any attempt to explain the phenomenon (except for traditional denial) is outside the framework of modern science, which does not yet recognize the dual nature of man.

In acute diseases, observation should be carried out as follows. First of all, the patient’s face: does it resemble the face of the healthy and especially itself, for the latter should be considered the best, and the one that deviates the most from it the most dangerous. It will be like this: the nose is sharp, the eyes are sunken, the temples are depressed... the earlobes are turned away, the skin on the forehead is hard, tense and dry, and the color of the whole face is green, black or pale, or leaden... If the eyes are afraid of the light and against their will they fill with tears or turn over , or one of them will become smaller than the other... if they also constantly move, or protrude strongly, or, conversely, sink strongly; if their pupil is dirty and without shine... then all these signs should be considered bad and disastrous... A deadly sign is also loose lips, hanging, cold and white.

Published in: Reader on the history of medicine: textbook / Ed. YES. Balalykina. – M.: Littera, 2012 – P.80.

Titus Lucretius Carus From the poem “On the Nature of Things.”

This workIV. BC. is an encyclopedic collection of all the advanced ideas and achievements of Roman natural philosophical thought. It reflected the level of development of philosophy, natural science, medicine, psychology, and history. In his poem, the author approached issues of natural science and medicine from the point of view of atomistic teaching. In a popular form, he talks about the complex structure of living organisms from the smallest moving particles, about the gradual development of flora and fauna, about differences in organisms and the transmission of traits by inheritance, about the extinction of unadapted organisms and the survival of adapted organisms. He characterizes some diseases and describes their individual symptoms. In one of the books of the poem, Lucretius sets out ideas about contagious diseases, puts forward the idea of ​​​​the reasons for their spread, and approaches the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bcontagiousness and transmission of infections.

Well, now, why do diseases occur, where do

May suddenly come and blow the wind of mortals

A plague of unexpected power, striking both people and herds,

I will explain. There are many different kinds of seeds,

As I have already indicated, some of which are life-giving,

But there are also many that lead to illness and death,

Flying to us. When they come together by chance

And the heavens will be outraged, the air becomes infected.

All this disastrous pestilence, all these endemic diseases

Or they come from outside and, like fogs and clouds,

They come from above through the sky, or arise from the earth itself,

Gathering together when a wet bud rots...

This new misfortune and infection, having appeared suddenly,

It may fall on the water, or settle on the very bread,

Or on food for people and on pastures for livestock,

Ile continues to hang, remaining in the air itself;

We, inhaling this fatally mixed air,

Both disease and infection must be inhaled.

Published in: Reader on the history of medicine: textbook / Ed. YES. Balalykina. – M.: Littera, 2012 - P.87.

Aulus Cornelius Celsus From the treatise “On Medicine”

(abbreviated)

There is no place where the art of medicine does not exist. Even the most uneducated peoples studied herbs and other remedies to help with illnesses and injuries. But among the Greeks, medicine was developed much more than among other peoples, and among them it was improved not from the first days of their history, but several centuries before our time; after all, Aesculapius is famous among them as the most ancient founder of medicine, and because he more accurately improved this science... he was numbered among the host of gods.

Then both of his sons Podalirius and Machaon, following the leader Agamemnon during the Trojan War, provided considerable assistance to their comrades in arms. However, according to the description. Homer, they provided certain assistance not during pestilence or for various diseases, but usually treated only wounds - both surgically and with the help of medicines. From this it is obvious that they worked only in this field of medicine, and this part of medical science is the most ancient. From the same author one can learn that at that time the origin of diseases was attributed to the wrath of the immortal gods and people usually turned to them for help. It is quite plausible that in the absence of therapeutic remedies against diseases, people still for the most part enjoyed good health thanks to good morals, not violated either by idleness or an immoderate lifestyle. These two vices contributed to the weakening of physical health, first in Greece and then here.

Medicine is divided into three parts: one treats with lifestyle, the other with drugs, and the third with surgery. The Greeks called the first part dietary, the second pharmaceutical, and the third surgical.

Since of the three parts of medicine the most difficult and at the same time the most famous is the one that deals with the treatment of diseases (lifestyle), then it is necessary to say about it first of all.

And since the first dispute that flared up is that some argue the need for experiments alone, while others put forward the idea that experience is not effective enough if there is no knowledge of the laws of the structure of the body and natural phenomena...

So, those (doctors) who represent medicine built on abstract principles put forward the need to know the following data: hidden causes that cause diseases, then obvious causes, then also the natural functions of the body and, finally, knowledge of internal organs. They call hidden causes those with the help of which we know what elements our bodies are made of, which contributes to health and ill health. And they are convinced that those who do not know the origin of diseases cannot know how to treat them.

In their opinion, the one who will truly treat correctly is the one who has not made a mistake about the root cause of the disease. They do not deny, however, that experiments are also necessary, but they argue that experiments can only be approached on the basis of a general thought based on reason.

After all, doctors of former times did not stuff patients with anything, but thought about what was most suitable for a given case, and explored through experience what they had previously arrived at through certain considerations; and it does not matter whether most of our knowledge has now been examined experimentally, since it has arisen on the basis of general considerations.

And this is the case with many issues. After all, new types of diseases often also appear, regarding which experience has not yet shown anything, so it is necessary to observe where they came from, without which no one can know why this or that remedy should be used; that is why they strive to study the reasons that remain obscure.

In addition, when pain appears in the internal organs and various types of diseases arise, then, in their opinion, someone who does not know the structure of the organs themselves cannot use therapeutic agents. Because of this, it is necessary to open the bodies of the dead and examine their internal organs. And very correctly, in their opinion, Herophilus and Erasistratus acted, who performed autopsies on living people, criminals received from prisons from the royal power, and while there was still breath left, they examined what nature had previously hidden from view: the position of the internal organs, their color , appearance, size, placement order, hardness, softness, smoothness, relationship...

On the contrary, those who call themselves empiricists, based on experience, point to obvious causes as necessary, but consider the study of hidden causes and natural functions unnecessary, since nature, in their opinion, is incomprehensible.

At first, at least, medicine developed not from these theoretical studies, but from experiments. Thus, among the patients who had no doctors present, some in the first days of their illness devoured food out of greed, others abstained from food out of disgust, and as a result, those who abstained from food received greater relief. Likewise, during an attack of fever, some patients ate something, others took food shortly before the attack; The best results were obtained from those who took food after the end of the fever.

Since these phenomena and others like them happened every day, attentive people noted what exactly led to the best result in most cases, and then began to give the patients appropriate prescriptions.

Thus, medicine arose from observations of the recovery of some and the death of others - a science that distinguishes between what is harmful and beneficial to health. Then, when treatments had already been found, people began to talk about the theoretical foundations of remedies, and medicine did not arise after theoretical justification, but the theory was found after the emergence of practical medicine.

...We need to study not how we breathe, but what cures heavy and labored breathing, and we also need to study not what makes the blood vessels beat, but what the types of pulsation mean. This can only be known through experience.

However, what was discussed may only seem unnecessary, but what remains to be said testifies to cruelty; in fact, the abdomen and chest cavity of living people are opened, and science, designed to protect people's health, brings a person not just death, but the most terrible one.

This cannot be justified, especially when, of those phenomena that are sought to be recognized with the help of such violence, some cannot be known at all, while others can be studied without even resorting to crime. There is nothing more stupid than to assume that the condition of the organs of a dying person and even a deceased person is the same as that of a living person. But, however, often the attending physicians have opportunities to examine the insides of a person while the latter preserves his life. Sometimes it happens that a gladiator is wounded in the arena, or a warrior in battle, or a traveler caught by robbers, so that some part of the insides is exposed, and in different ways for different persons: this is how an astute physician becomes familiar with the place, location, order of placement, and the like properties of internal organs, without resorting to murder, but promoting health, and showing mercy, he studies what others learned through terrible cruelty.

Published in: Reader on the history of medicine: textbook / Ed. YES. Balalykina. – M.: Littera, 2012 - P.89-94.