| When he says that hops purges choler, he doesn't mean in the same way as scammony does. |
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| Grosseteste uses an example, drawn from Avicenna, of the claim that scammony of itself causes the discharge of red bile. |
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| Wondering whether this is true, we set up what we should now call a controlled experiment in which we exclude other known causes of the discharge of red bile and give someone scammony to see what will happen. |
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| We infer that the repeated connection involves an essential relation between two things: e.g., it is not accidental that the purging of bile follows the ingestion of scammony, for regularities cannot be due to chance. |
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| For instance, the knowledge of the causal power of scammony to purge red bile arises only after we observe a number of cases where it does this, and so come to form an aestimatio that it does in this or that particular case. |
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| Scammony, a purgative, is derived from the rhizomes of C. scammonia, a trailing perennial with white to pink flowers, native in western Asia. |
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