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| On the Difference in the Health of Twins.
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Chapter 2.—On the Difference in
the Health of Twins.
Cicero says that the famous
physician Hippocrates has left in writing that he had suspected
that a certain pair of brothers were twins, from the fact that they
both took ill at once, and their disease advanced to its crisis and
subsided in the same time in each of them.190
| 190 This fact is not recorded in any
of the extant works of Hippocrates or Cicero. Vives supposes it
may have found place in Cicero’s book, De Fato. | Posidonius the Stoic, who was
much given to astrology, used to explain the fact by supposing that
they had been born and conceived under the same constellation. In
this question the conjecture of the physician is by far more worthy
to be accepted, and approaches much nearer to credibility, since,
according as the parents were affected in body at the time of
copulation, so might the first elements of the fœtuses have been
affected, so that all that was necessary for their growth and
development up till birth having been supplied from the body of the
same mother, they might be born with like constitutions.
Thereafter, nourished in the same house, on the same kinds of food,
where they would have also the same kinds of air, the same
locality, the same quality of water,—which, according to the
testimony of medical science, have a very great influence, good or
bad, on the condition of bodily health,—and where they would also
be accustomed to the same kinds of exercise, they would have bodily
constitutions so similar that they would be similarly affected with
sickness at the same time and by the same causes. But, to wish to
adduce that particular position of the stars which existed at the
time when they were born or conceived as the cause of their being
simultaneously affected with sickness, manifests the greatest
arrogance, when so many beings of most diverse kinds, in the most
diverse conditions, and subject to the most diverse events, may
have been conceived and born at the same time, and in the same
district, lying under the same sky. But we know that twins do not
only act differently, and travel to very different places, but that
they also suffer from different kinds of sickness; for which
Hippocrates would give what is in my opinion the simplest reason,
namely, that, through diversity of food and exercise, which arises
not from the constitution of the body, but from the inclination of
the mind, they may have come to be different from each other in
respect of health. Moreover, Posidonius, or any other asserter of
the fatal influence of the stars, will have enough to do to find
anything to say to this, if he be unwilling to im
pose upon the
minds of the uninstructed in things of which they are ignorant.
But, as to what they attempt to make out from that very small
interval of time elapsing between the births of twins, on account
of that point in the heavens where the mark of the natal hour is
placed, and which they call the “horoscope,” it is either
disproportionately small to the diversity which is found in the
dispositions, actions, habits, and fortunes of twins, or it is
disproportionately great when compared with the estate of twins,
whether low or high, which is the same for both of them, the cause
for whose greatest difference they place, in every case, in the
hour on which one is born; and, for this reason, if the one is born
so immediately after the other that there is no change in the
horoscope, I demand an entire similarity in all that respects them
both, which can never be found in the case of any twins. But if
the slowness of the birth of the second give time for a change in
the horoscope, I demand different parents, which twins can never
have.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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