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12 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity
(archai) or ‘elements’ (stoicheia) of organic substances through anatomical
structures such as bones and the vascular system, fluids such as humours,
qualities such as hot and cold, and physiological proportions and ‘blendings’
(kraseis) right through to the most sophisticated psycho-physical functions
such as soul, sense-perception, thinking and reproduction. We perceive
this ‘agenda’ in texts as early as the Hippocratic worksOn Fleshes,On the
Nature of ManandOn Regimen, or in such later works as Nemesius’On
the Nature of Man, Vindicianus’On the Nature of the Human Raceand in
the treatiseOn the Seed, preserved in a Brussels manuscript and attributed
to Vindicianus, and there are similar points of overlap in the doxographical
tradition. Even a philosopher like Plato, who seems to have had very little
reason to be interested in mundane matters like disease or bodily waste
products, deals at surprising length and in very considerable detail with
the human body and what may go wrong with it, using an elaborate clas-
sification of bodily fluids and types of disease (physical as well as mental)
according to their physiological causes. Plato was of course not a doctor,
but he was clearly aware of the medical doctrines of his time and took them
sufficiently seriously to incorporate them into this account of the nature of
the world and the human body as set out in theTimaeus.
Yet interaction was not confined to matters of content, but also took
place in the field of methodology and epistemology. As early as the Hip-
pocratic medical writers, one finds conceptualisations and terminologi-
cal distinctions relating to such notions as ‘nature’ (phusis), ‘cause’ (aitia,
prophasis), ‘sign’ (s ̄emeion), ‘indication’ (tekm ̄erion), ‘proof ’ (pistis), ‘faculty’
(dunamis), or theoretical reflection on epistemological issues such as causal
explanation, observation, analogy and experimentation. This is continued
in fourth-century medicine, with writers such as Diocles of Carystus and
Mnesitheus of Athens, in whose works we find striking examples of the use
of definition, explanation, division and classification according to genus and
species relations, and theoretical reflection on the modalities and the ap-
propriateness of these epistemological procedures, on the requirements that
have to be fulfilled in order to make them work. In Hellenistic medicine,
authors such as Herophilus and Erasistratus made important theoretical
points about causation, teleological versus mechanical explanation, and
horror vacui, and in the ‘sectarian’ debates between Empiricists, Dogma-
tists and Methodists major theoretical issues were raised about the nature
of knowledge and science. Subsequently, in the Imperial period, we can
observe the application and further development of logic and philosophy
of science in writers such as Galen (chapter 10 ) and Caelius Aurelianus
(chapter 11 ). And again, it is by no means the case that the medical writers
