6 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity
accessible to a wider group of scholars and students. An almost exclusive
focus on medical ideas and theories has given way to a consideration of
the relation between medical ‘science’ and its environment – be it social,
political, economic, or cultural and religious. Indeed ‘science’ itself is now
understood as just one of a variety of human cultural expressions, and the
distinction between ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science’ has been abandoned as
historically unfruitful. And medicine – or ‘healing’, or ‘attitudes and ac-
tions with regard to health and sickness’, or whatever name one prefers
in order to define the subject – is no longer regarded as the intellectual
property of a small elite of Greek doctors and scientists. There is now a
much wider definition of what ‘ancient medicine’ actually involves, partly
inspired by the social and cultural history of medicine, the study of medical
anthropology and the study of healthcare systems in a variety of cultures
and societies. The focus of medical history is on the question of how a soci-
ety and its individuals respond to pathological phenomena such as disease,
pain, death, how it ‘constructs’ these phenomena and how it contextualises
them, what it recognises as pathological in the first place, what it labels as
a disease or aberration, as an epidemic disease, as mental illness, and so on.
How do such responses translate in social, cultural and institutional terms:
how is a ‘healthcare system’ organised? What status do the practitioners
or ‘providers’ of treatment enjoy? How do they arrive at their views, the-
ories and practices? How do they communicate these to their colleagues
and wider audiences, and what rhetorical and argumentative techniques do
they use in order to persuade their colleagues and their customers of the
preferability of their own approach as opposed to that of their rivals? How
is authority established and maintained, and how are claims to competence
justified? The answers to these questions tell us something about the wider
system of moral, social and cultural values of a society, and as such they
are of interest also to those whose motivation to engage in the subject is
not primarily medical. As the comparative history of medicine and science
has shown, societies react to these phenomena in different ways, and it is
interesting and illuminating to compare similarities and differences in these
reactions, since they often reflect deeper differences in social and cultural
values.^6
From this perspective, the study of ancient medicine now starts from the
basic observation that in the classical world, health and disease were matters
of major concern which affected everyone and had a profound effect on the
way people lived, what they ate and drank, how they organised their private
(^6) See the work of G. E. R. Lloyd, especially his ( 1996 a), ( 2002 ) and ( 2003 ).