To help, or to do no harm 103
questions such as the following: Are therapeutics and medicine identical?
Or is therapeutics a part of medicine, or perhaps an aim (or eventheaim)
of medicine? Or is therapy just one among several different activities the
doctor carries out? And how are the various components, or methods, of
therapy interrelated? Do they all have the same purpose, and are they all
considered to be equally important? Is there a special status for dietetics
(which does not necessarily aim athealing)? The answers to these questions
are by no means obvious, yet they are of fundamental importance to an
understanding of what Greek doctors of this period were up to and what
they believed the purposes of their activities to be.
As is well known, in sections 5 – 8 of the proem Celsus discusses the
early period when the medical art was – in Celsus’ view perniciously –
incorporated within the theoretical study of the nature of things (rerum
naturae contemplatio) and he presents, with obvious approval, Hippocrates
as the one who emancipated medicine out of the bondage of philosophy
(studium sapientiae), the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, which Celsus
claims to be so fundamentally harmful to the body:
Ergo etiam post eos de quibus rettuli, nulli clari uiri medicinam exercuerunt donec
maiore studio litterarum disciplina agitari coepit ( 6 ) quae, ut animo praecipue
omnium necessaria, sic corpori inimica est. Primoque medendi scientia sapien-
tiae pars habebatur ut et morborum curatio et rerum naturae contemplatio sub
isdem auctoribus nata sit, ( 7 ) scilicet iis hanc maxime requirentibus qui corpo-
rum suorum robora quieta cogitatione nocturnaque uigilia minuerant. Ideoque
multos ex sapientiae professoribus peritos eius fuisse accipimus, clarissimos uero
ex his Pythagoran et Empedoclen et Democritum. ( 8 ) Huius autem, ut quidam
crediderunt, discipulus, Hippocrates Cous, primus ex omnibus memoria dignus,
a studio sapientiae disciplinam hanc separauit, uir et arte et facundia insignis.^5
After those, then, of whom I have just spoken, no man of any fame practised
the art of medicine until literary activity began to be practised with greater zeal,
( 6 ) which, while being most necessary of all for the mind, is also harmful to the
body. At first the knowledge of healing was regarded as a part of wisdom,^6 so that
both the treatment of diseases and the study of natural things came into being
under the same authorities, ( 7 ) clearly because those who most required it [i.e.
medicine] were those who had weakened the strength of their bodies by their
sedentary thinking and their wakeful nights. For this reason, as we hear, many
of those who claimed expertise in wisdom were experienced in it [i.e. medicine],
the most famous of them indeed being Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus.
( 8 ) But a pupil of this last, as some believed him to be, Hippocrates of Cos, the
(^5) Text according to Serbat ( 1995 ) 3 – 5.
(^6) Sapientiaclearly covers both science and philosophy.