Introduction 13
were exclusively on the receiving end: theories about causation or inference
from signs constitute good examples of areas in which major theoretical
and conceptual distinctions were first formulated in medical discourse and
subsequently incorporated in philosophical discussions.^20
It would therefore be quite wrong to regard Aristotle’s and Galen’s per-
ceptions of the overlap between medicine and philosophy as anachronistic
distortions or projections of their own preoccupations, or to believe that,
when ‘philosophers’ had medical interests, these were nothing more than
eccentric curiosity. To the Greek thinkers, areas such as those mentioned
above represented aspects of natural and human reality just as interesting
and significant as the movements of the celestial bodies, the origins of earth-
quakes or the growth of plants and trees, and at least equally revealing of
the underlying universal principles of stability and change. Nor were their
interests in the medical area limited to theoretical study or the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake without extending to ‘clinical’ or ‘therapeutic’
practice. Some are known to have put their ideas into practice, such as
Empedocles, who seems to have been engaged in considerable therapeutic
activity, or Democritus, who is reported to have carried out anatomical
research on a significant scale, or, to take a later example, Sextus Empiricus,
who combined his authorship of philosophical writings on Scepticism with
medical practice.
Such connections between theory and practical application, and such
combinations of apparently separate activities, may still strike us as re-
markable. Nevertheless we should bear in mind, first, that especially in the
period up to about400 b c e(the time in which most of the better-known
Hippocratic writings are believed to have been produced), ‘philosophy’ was
hardly ever pursued entirely for its own sake and was deemed of considerable
practical relevance, be it in the field of ethics and politics, in the techni-
cal mastery of natural things and processes, or in the provision of health
and healing. Secondly, the idea of a ‘division of labour’ which, sometimes
implicitly, underlies such a sense of surprise is in fact anachronistic. We
may rightly feel hesitant to call people such as Empedocles, Democritus,
Pythagoras and Alcmaeon ‘doctors’, but this is largely because that term
conjures up associations with a type of professional organisation and spe-
cialisation that developed only later, but which are inappropriate to the
actual practice of the care for the human body in the archaic and classical
period. The evidence for ‘specialisation’ in this period is scanty, for doctors
(^20) See, e.g., Hankinson ( 1987 ) on the role of the Pneumatist physician Athenaeus of Attalia in the
development of the notion of antecedent causation.