Introduction 15
Yet although all the above may seem uncontroversial, the relationship
between Aristotelianism and medicine has long been a neglected area in
scholarship on ancient medicine. The medical background of Aristotle’s
biological and physiological theories has long been underestimated by a
majority of Aristotelian scholars – and if it was considered at all, it tended to
be subject to gross simplification.^21 Likewise, on the medico-historical side,
the contribution made by Aristotelianism to the development of medicine
has long been largely ignored, especially as far as the later history of the
Peripatetic school is concerned.^22 This seems to be due to a most un-
fortunate disciplinary dividing line between philosophers and historians of
medicine: while the former used to regard the medical aspects of Aristotelian
thought as philosophically less interesting, the latter usually did not engage
in Aristotelianism because it was believed to be philosophy not medicine.
These attitudes appear to have been based on what I regard as a misun-
derstanding of the Aristotelian view on the status of medicine as a science
and its relationship to biology and physics, and on the erroneous belief
that no independent medical research took place within the Aristotelian
school. Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical and practical sciences is
sometimes believed to imply that, while doctors were primarily concerned
with practical application, philosophers only took a theoretical interest in
medical subjects.^23 As we have seen above, there are important exceptions
to this rule; and Aristotle’s own activities in the medical domain, too, have
been more significant than has sometimes been appreciated. It is true that
Aristotle was one of the first to spell out the differences between medicine
and natural philosophy; but, as I argue in chapters 6 and 9 , it is often
ignored that the point of the passages in which he does so is to stress
the substantial overlap that existed between the two areas. And Aristotle
is making this point in the context of a theoretical, physicist account of
psycho-physical functions, where he is wearing the hat of thephusikos, the
‘student of nature’; but this seems not to have prevented him from dealing
with more specialised medical topics in different, more ‘practical’ contexts.
That such more practical, specialised treatments existed is suggested by the
fact that in the indirect tradition Aristotle is credited with several writings
on medical themes and with a number of doctrines on rather specialised
medical topics. And as I argue in chapter 9 , one of those medical works
may well be identical to the text that survives in the form of book 10 of his
History of Animals.
(^21) For a discussion of an example of such simplification see ch. 9.
(^22) Thus a recent medico-historical textbook like Conrad et al. ( 1995 ) devotes only two pages to Aristotle,
and makes no reference at all to Theophrastus or the later Peripatos.
(^23) For a fuller discussion see ch. 9.