MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

18 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity

the phenomenon Aristotle describes has a somewhat peculiar, ambivalent

status:eutuchiais natural yet not fully normal, and although it leads to

success, it is not a desirable state to be in or to rely on – and as such it is

comparable to the ‘exceptional performances’ (theperitton) of the melan-

cholic discussed in chapter 5. We touch here on yet another major theme

that has been fundamental to the development of European thought and

in which ancient medicine has played a crucial role: the close link be-

tween genius and madness, which both find their origin in the darker, less

controllable sides of human nature.

4 philosophical interests of medical writers

As in the case of the pursuits of the ‘philosophers’ discussed above, it is,

conversely, no exaggeration to say that what a number of Greek people

whom we regard as medical thinkers were up to is very similar to, or at least

coterminous with these. The fact that many of these writers and their works

have, in the later tradition, been associated with Hippocrates and placed

under the rubric of medicine, easily makes one forget that these thinkers

may have had rather different conceptions of the disciplines or contexts in

which they were working. Thus the authors of such Hippocratic works as

On the Nature of Man,On Fleshes,On the Nature of the Child,On Places in

ManandOn Regimenas well as the Pythagorean writer Alcmaeon of Croton

emphatically put their investigations of the human body in a physicist and

cosmological framework. Some of them may have had very little ‘clinical’

or therapeutic interest, while for others the human body and its reactions

to disease and treatment were just one of several areas of study. Thus it

has repeatedly been claimed (though this view has been disputed) that

the Hippocratic worksOn the Art of MedicineandOn Breathswere not

written by doctors or medical people at all, but by ‘sophists’ writing on

technai(‘disciplines’, fields of systematic study with practical application)

for whom medicine was just one of several intellectual pursuits. Be that as

it may, the authors ofOn RegimenandOn Fleshes, for instance, certainly

display interests and methods that correspond very neatly to the agendas of

people such as Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, and the difference is of degree

rather than kind.

A further relevant point here is that what counted as medicine in the

fifth and fourth centuriesbcewas still a relatively fluid field, for which

rival definitions were continuously being offered. And ‘medicine’ (iatrik ̄e),

like ‘philosophy’, was not a monolithic entity. There was very considerable

diversity among Greek medical people, not only between the ‘rational’,