ron
(Ron)
#1
20 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity
add, like all other phenomena), has its own ‘nature’, its peculiar determined,
normal, stable and self-contained identity. Knowledge of this identity, and
of the regularity that results from this, will allow one to recognise and
understand individual instances of the phenomenon, to predict its future
occurrence and by medical intervention influence it or even prevent it from
happening or spreading. And in making this claim, the author polemicises
against people whom he calls ‘magicians, quacks, charlatans’, who regard
the disease as a form of whimsical, unpredictable divine intervention or
even demonic possession and whose therapeutic practice is determined by
magical beliefs and procedures. He describes the development of the disease
from its earliest, prenatal and indeed ancestral stages; he identifies the brain
as the seat of consciousness (a theme I shall examine in greater depth in
chapter 4 ) and as the primary organ affected by the disease; he discusses a
whole range of additional factors, both internal and external, that set the
disease in motion or influence its actual development; and he gives a vivid
account of the various stages of an epileptic seizure, relating each of the
symptoms to a particular underlying physiological cause.
Yet for all the emphasis on the naturalness and ‘rationality’ of his ap-
proach, we shall see in chapter 1 that the author rules out neither the
divinity of the diseases nor the possibility of divine intervention as such.
He is distinguishing between an appropriate appeal to the gods for purifi-
cation from the ‘pollution’ (miasma) of moral transgressions (hamart ̄emata)
that has disturbed the relationship between man and the gods, and an in-
appropriate appeal to the gods for the purification of the alleged pollution
of the ‘so-called sacred disease’. This is inappropriate, he says, for diseases
are not sent by a god – to say so would be blasphemous, he insists – they
are natural phenomena which can be cured by natural means, and they do
not constitute a pollution in the religious sense. The text has often been
read as if the author ruled out divine ‘intervention’as such. But in fact,
there is no evidence that he does – indeed, he does not even rule out that
gods may cure diseases, if approached in the proper way and on the basis
of appropriate premises.
Such negative readings of the text attributing to the author the ruling
out of all forms of divine intervention have presumably been inspired by
a wishful belief among interpreters to ‘rationalise’ or ‘secularise’ Hippo-
cratic medicine – a belief possibly inspired by the desire to see Hippocratic
medicine as the forerunner of modern biomedicine, and which can be par-
alleled with interpretative tendencies to ‘demythologise’ philosophers such
as Parmenides, Pythagoras and Empedocles to make them fit our concept
of ‘philosophy’ more comfortably. Yet recently, there has been a renewed
appreciation of the ‘mythical’ or ‘religious’ aspects of early Greek thought,
