Hippocrates seems to be both the last witness and the most ambiguous representative of this balance: fifth century Greek medicine would seem to be no more than the codification of this universal, yet immediate, clinical medicine; it formed the first total consciousness of this clinical medicine, and in this sense, it seems to he as 'pure and simple as that first experience; but insofar as it organizes it into a systematic corpus in order to facilitate and shorten the study of it a new dimension is introduced into medical experience: that of a corpus of knowledge that can be said to be, quite literally, blind, since it has no gaze.