118 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystus
with regard to the claims of dietetics and indeed medicine as a whole in
the fourth century – and, perhaps, with regard to the competence of the
practitioners of dietetics. For the Hippocratic and Dioclean conception of
medical care, combined with a growing awareness of the need for preven-
tion of disease by means of a healthy lifestyle, seems to have led to a rapid
expansion of the territory for which Greek physicians claimed expertise.
Such a ‘medicalisation’ of daily life was strengthened by the intellectual
cachet and rhetorical elegance of medicine which Celsus refers to, and to
which the extant fragments of Diocles’ works certainly testify; but it is easy
to see how it may have met with resistance – an unease which is reflected,
as far as the application of dietetic principles to the treatment of diseases is
concerned, by Plato’s well-known attack on dietetics in theRepublic.^69
In the light of such unease and doubts about the qualifications and
competence of the practitioners of medical care, it is understandable that
doctors started to specialise. This is illustrated by the fragment of Diocles’
contemporary Mnesitheus just quoted, and also by a fragment of Erasistra-
tus,^70 in which a distinction between medicine (
) and the care for
health (1 H
) is connected with a distinction between two different
practitioners: the ‘healer’ (
!) and the ‘health specialist’ (H
!). It
is also illustrated five centuries later by Galen’s treatiseThrasybulus, which
deals with the question ‘Whether the care for the healthy body belongs
to medicine or to gymnastics’. But this specialisation, or indeed compart-
mentalisation, of medical care meant that the unity of therapeutics which
the Hippocratic doctors had insisted on, was gradually lost: the distance
between patient and doctor steadily increased – a development that has
continued up to the present day, and which clearly goes against what I
would still call the spirit of Hippocratic medicine.
(^69403) e ff., on which see Wohrle ( ̈ 1990 ) 122 – 4.
(^70) Fr. 156 Garofalo.