Whether there were other factors as well to induce the old Physicians to apply the ordinary treatment of ulcers in general to those of the genital organs, we cannot indeed as yet for the time being determine. Certainly the conjecture is an obvious one that they may well have had an inkling of the specific nature of such ulcers, and that it was not merely the local mischief they sought to put a stop to by early application of cautery and knife. However it is only further and more careful investigations that must be allowed to decide the point,—the more so, as the general _views as to the formation of ulcers_ held by the Ancients seem in many respects to tell against it. Thus _Galen_[287] says: “The mode in which these (ulcers involving destruction of substance) are set up however is twofold; they arise either by removal of surrounding tissue (ἐκ περιαιρέσεως) or by eating away (ἐξ ἀναβρώσεως). How the former acts is well known. As to the eating away, if it proceed from the inward parts of the organism, it is an outcome of the evil humours; but if it arise from outside, then it is a result of the physician’s remedial measures or of fire.” From this we gather that all ulcers of the genitals, as well as others, which did not result from the action either of remedial measures or of fire, were held as being necessarily an outcome of the evil humours of the body. Further, that this view was not in any way peculiar to the time of Galen, but was a direct and necessary consequence of the further development of the pathology of “humours,” follows from the circumstance that we find the same opinion expressed by _Hippocrates_.[288] Again _Plato_ shared the latter author’s general doctrine of _apostasis_ (suppurative inflammation taking off evil humours) in his “Timaeus”, where he derives from the white phlegm, striking outwards to the skin, cutaneous eruptions, rashes and the like maladies, from the acrid, salty phlegm on the other hand the fluxes of all types, bearing different names according to the different parts of the body affected.