Heart, brain, blood, pneuma 125
taken by the fifth-century medical writer Alcmaeon of Croton (South Italy),
who was thought to be the first to discover the existence of the optic nerve,
by the author of the Hippocratic workOn the Sacred Disease, and by Plato
(in theTimaeus). The cardiocentric view was represented in the Hippo-
cratic writingsOn Diseases 2 (fifth centurybce),On the Heart(end of the
fourth/start of the third centurybce) and by Aristotle, Diocles of Carystus
and Praxagoras of Cos (fourth centurybce). The haematocentric view was
taken by Empedocles and the authors of the Hippocratic writingsOn Dis-
eases 1 andOn Breaths(all fifth centurybce). Although this division may
be largely appropriate in terms of the period concerned, it is already too
much a product of the schematisation mentioned above, which became
characteristic of the debate in later doxography. Strictly speaking, only the
authors ofOn the Sacred DiseaseandOn the Heartexpress an opinion on the
locationof what they consider the highest psychic faculty, the former choos-
ing the brain, the latter the heart. Apart from this, the division into three
areas presents the matter in too static a way: most of the authors mentioned
appear to regard psychic activities mainly asprocesses, in which some parts of
the body are more involved than others, but which are in principle based on
the interaction between a number of anatomical and physiological factors.
It would be better to ask in which terms ancient doctors from the fifth
and fourth centuriesbcethought about these matters, and which types of
arguments they used to substantiate their views. The following categories
can be discerned:
faculties (thought, perception, feeling, etc.)
parts of the body (heart, brain, diaphragm, etc.)
substances (blood, air, phlegm, etc.)
processes (decay, constipation, etc.)
relations/proportions (balance, mixture, etc.)
In the discussions which doctors devote to the subject, they employ terms
that on the one hand refer to a certain part of the body or otherwise
anatomical-physiological material, and on the other hand to an activity
or faculty exercised or enabled by it: the part of the body ‘contributes to’,
is ‘the instrument of ’ or ‘the material substrate of ’ a ‘faculty’ or ‘ability’.
It is not always immediately obvious to what extent the medical authors
made a distinction between ‘mental’ processes as such and physiological
processes.^14 Most authors of the Hippocratic Corpus appear to assume a
kind of continuum between body and mind: in lists of symptoms, psycho-
logical phenomena are mentioned among purely physical ones without any
(^14) See the discussion in Singer ( 1992 ) 131 – 43.