Long before modern medicine thought of old age as a disease, the Greeks and Romans appear to have referred to it as such and their learned men to have worked out theories on similar lines. Aristotle distinguished old age as a “natural” disease; both he and the Hippocratic school sought to devise a pathology of aging on the basis of the four “humours.” Both were agreed that a loss of heat lay at the root of the matter, but Aristotle thought this was accompanied by dryness, the Hippocratic school by humidity. In the end it was the Aristotelian position which posterity accepted and embraced into the last century.
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