method enables the physician to make discoveries over a long period of time. The discipline must be flexible and receptive to new discoveries. In chapters 3–8, the author supports the claim that medicine has a method of discovery by giving an account of medicine's origins and discoveries. He traces it back to a regimen beneficial for the sick and observes that some foods are not beneficial for either the healthy or the sick. The author cites accounts of human beings from the fifth-century who suffered as a result of their savage diet. As a result, techniques were developed for the preparation of food best suited in producing a healthy and civilized human being. He likens it to a medical discovery (3.4-6); and as such constitutes a general tekhne. The author establishes a close methodological parallel between cooking and medicine. In cooking it is critical to recognize that human beings have a nature distinct from animals. For instance, humans are less capable of digesting raw meats. Thus, allowances must be made in the preparation and cooking of meat that best suit the human metabolism (3.5). The most common element between cooking and medicine is the mixing and blending of foods. Medicine, however, requires a greater discrimination between food types and classes of individuals so that correct nutritional needs may be identified and prescribed (5). The practitioner in the end acquires mastery of preparing foods and the ability to identify the class of individuals to whom the food is administered. In this regard, cooking and medicine are the same (chaps. 7–8). It is in chapter 13 that the author returns to his analysis of his opponent's hypothesis theory. His goal is to explore the potential consequences of the principle in question. The proponents of cure by contraries assume that all diseases have their roots in the humors hot, cold, wet, dry, and that the cure for each disease is the opposite of the cause. The author imagines a situation where a person changes his food from cooked to raw and as a result becomes ill. Thus, the cause of a given illness is associated with a given humor and the cure as being that humor's opposite. Hot therefore would cure cold, and dry would be the cure for wet. The author sees this as an oversimplification. He argues that cooking is a process in which the original raw food losses some of