MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Introduction 19

philosophically inspired medicine that we find in the Hippocratic writings

on the one hand and what is sometimes called the ‘folk medicine’ practised

by drugsellers, rootcutters and suchlike on the other, but even among more

intellectual, elite physicians themselves. One of the crucial points on which

they were divided was precisely the ‘philosophical’ nature of medicine – the

question of to what extent medicine should be built on the foundation of a

comprehensive theory of nature, the world and the universe. It is interesting

in this connection that one of the first attestations of the wordphilosophia

in Greek literature occurs in a medical context – the Hippocratic work

On Ancient Medicine– where it is suggested that this is not an area with

which medicine should engage itself too much. It is clear from the context

that what the author has in mind is approaches to medicine that take as

their point of departure a general theory about ‘nature’ (phusis), more in

particular theories that reduce all physical phenomena to unproven ‘postu-

lates’ (hupotheseis), such as the elementary qualities hot, cold, dry and wet

• theories which the author associates with the practice of Empedocles,

who reduced natural phenomena to the interaction and combinations of

the four elements earth, fire, water and air. The polemical tone of the

treatise suggests that such ‘philosophical’ approaches to medicine were be-

coming rather popular, and this is borne out by the extant evidence such

as that provided by the Hippocratic treatises mentioned above. There were

a number of medical authors for whom what we call ‘philosophy’ would

not have been an inappropriate term to describe their projects – regardless

of whether or not they knew and used the term.

To this group certainly belongs the author of the treatise which is de-

servedly one of the most famous writings in the Hippocratic Corpus,On

the Sacred Disease. As I alluded to above, this work has long been read

as the paradigm of Greek fifth-century rationalism. And it is certainly

true that this author, in claiming that epilepsy ‘has a nature’, is doing

something very similar to what the Presocratics did in inquiring into the

‘nature’ (phusis) of things, namely their origin, source of growth and identi-

fying structure – be they earthquakes and solar eclipses, or bodily processes

and changes, illnesses, conditions, affections, symptoms, or substances like

foods, drinks, drugs and poisons and the effects they produced on the bod-

ies of human beings. And just like Ionian philosophers such as Anaximenes

and Anaxagoras in their explanations of earthquakes, solar eclipses, thun-

derstorms and other marvellous phenomena, he produces a ‘natural’ ex-

planation for a phenomenon – in his case ‘the so-called sacred disease’,

epilepsy – that used to be seen as the manifestation of immediate divine

agency. Epilepsy, the author argues, like all other diseases (and, one may