The pitiful state of contemporary medicine, in contrast to the medicine of the Ancients Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Galen, is caused first of all because the contemporaries do not follow a medical epistemology. ‘Abd al-Latif observes that, even in antiquity, medical sects had existed which taught false medicine. ‘Abd al-Latif recalls, in particular, the Empirical and Methodist sects which were in opposition to the Dogmatic or Rationalist one, according to the classic tripartite division of medical schools which were known to Arabic authors due precisely to the Arabic translation of many introductory works by Galen and pseudo-Galen. The Empirical sect of Sceptical inspiration, in fact, was neither concerned to study the anatomical structure of the human body nor the internal secrets of illnesses. It rejected any possible analogy between the dead body and the living body. It denied any general theory. The medicine which it taught, therefore, translated itself into a medical practice totally alien to the anatomic-physiological basis of symptoms and was wholly linked to clinical phenomena and the classification of symptoms and medicines. The Methodist sect of Stoic and Epicurean inspiration, for which human life was the natural place for moral and physical suffering, held that the human body was formed of atoms which could not be perceived by the senses and which were in continual movement through pores and channels. According to this sect, illness came about in the case of an alteration in the quality and the movement of the corpuscles or in the case of an excessive tightening or relaxing of the pores through which the atoms moved. Therapy, therefore, was reduced to baths designed to provoke sweat in cases of the tightening of the pores and astringents and tonics in the case of dilation, in order to return to an intermediate perviousness. ‘Abd al-Latif holds that the above sects are far removed from the medicine practiced by the Dogmatic doctors of Platonic and Aristotelian inspiration who considered anatomy and physiology to be the basic sciences and for whom the detailed study of the internal causes of an illness was primary and necessary. Nevertheless, the criteria followed by the Empirical and the Methodist sects were thus far scientific: the physicians followed a theory and did not proceed by pure and simple supposition, as most contemporary physicians did (Joosse &amp; Pormann 2010).