Who is attacked in on ancient medicine

Skip to search form Skip to main content You are currently offline. Some features of the site may not work correctly. DOI: Lloyd Published Philosophy Phronesis On Ancient Medicine' is generally acknowledged to be a document of the first importance for our understanding of the developnment of early Greek thought. Yet the problem of its relation to the medicine and philosophy of its time is still a very open one. In their editions of the treatise both W.

Jones2 and A. Festugiere3 discuss some of the conflicting opinions of earlier writers who tackled this question.

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Open Access for Academic Societies. About us. Stay updated. Corporate Social Responsiblity. Investor Relations. Review a Brill Book. Reference Works. Primary source collections. As the divine origin of disease was gradually [p. Philosophy superseded religion. Greek philosophy sought for uniformity in the multiplicity of phenomena, and the desire to find this uniformity led to guesswork and to neglect of fact in the attempt to frame a comprehensive theory.

The same impulse which made Thales declare that all things are water led the writer of a treatise 1 in the Hippocratic Corpus to maintain that all diseases are caused by air.

As Daremberg 2 says, " the philosophers tried to explain nature while shutting their eyes. Alcmaeon 3 of Croton, although perhaps not strictly a Pythagorean, was closely connected with the sect, and appears to have exercised considerable influence upon the Hippocratic school. The founder of empirical psychology and a student of astronomy, he held that health consists of a state of balance between certain " opposites," and disease an undue preponderance of one of them. In this case we have a Pythagorean philosopher who tried to include medical [p.

This combination of medicine and philosophy is clearly marked in the Hippocratic collection. The Roman Celsus in his preface 7 asserts that Hippocrates separated medicine from philosophy, and it is a fact that the best works of the Hippocratic school are as free from philosophic assumptions as they are from religious dogma. But before attempting to estimate the work of Hippocrates it is necessary to consider, not only the doctrine of the philosophers, but also the possibly pre-Hippocratic books in the Corpus.

The Treatise on Seven , with its marked Pythagorean characteristics, proves, if indeed it is as early as Roscher would have us believe, that even before Hippocrates disease was considered due to a disturbance in the balance of the humours, and health to a " coction " of them, while the supposed preponderance of seven doubtless exercised some influence on the later doctrine of critical days.

The work may be taken to be typical of the Italian-Sicilian school of medicine, in which a priori assumptions of the " philosophic " type were freely admitted. Besides these two schools there was also a famous one at Cnidos, 9 the doctrines of which are criticised in the Hippocratic treatise Regimen in Acute Diseases.

The defects of this school seem to have been 1 the use of too few remedies ; 2 faulty or imperfect prognosis ; 3 over-elaboration in classifying diseases. This rationalism concluded that disease and health depended on environment and on the supposed constituents of the human frame. Now if we take the Hippocratic collection we find that in no treatise is there any superstition, 11 in many there is much " philosophy " with some sophistic rhetoric, and among the others some are merely technical handbooks, while others show signs of a great mind, dignified and reserved with all the severity of the Periclean period, which, without being distinctively original, transformed the best tendencies in Greek medicine into something which has ever since been the admiration of doctors and scientific men.

It is with the last only that I am concerned at present. I shall make no attempt to fix with definite precision which treatises are to be included in this category, and I shall confine myself for the moment to three-- Prognostic, Regimen in Acute Diseases, and Epidemics I. These show certain characteristics, which, although there is no internal clue to [p. They remind one, in a subtle yet very real way, of Thucydides. There is no attempt at " window-dressing.

Not a word is thrown away. The first two treatises have a literary finish, yet there is no trace in them of sophistic rhetoric. Thought, and the expression of thought, are evenly balanced. Both are clear, dignified--even majestic. The matter is even more striking than the style. The spirit is truly scientific, in the modern and strictest sense of the word. There is no superstition, and, except perhaps in the doctrine of critical days, no philosophy.

The doctrine of these three treatises may be summarised as follows 14 [p. This disturbance is connected with atmospheric and climatic conditions. It may be urged that this doctrine is as hypothetical as the thesis that all diseases come from air. In a sense it is. All judgments, however simple, attempting to explain sense-perceptions, are hypotheses. Moreover if a physician explains diseases by hot or cold or dry or wet, whether these are substances or qualities, in my opinion he is the author's opponent.

Thus the opponents' range can be enlarged. While the author of AM attempts to exclude Empedoclean thought from medicine, the author of NM adopts it so positively. This author rejects the monistic view about man in chapters 1 and 2, and in chapter 3 tells that man is composed of hot, cold, dry and wet.

And in the subsequent chapters he argues that man's body is composed of the four humours, and associates each humour with hot, cold, dry and wet respectively. It is noticeable that the author takes the pluralistic view and thinks that elements are four in number, that he make much of hot, cold, dry and wet, and that he explains man' generation and health by the balanced mixture. This shows Empedocles' influence on the author.