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26 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity
especially because of his anatomical research and discoveries, his views on
physiology, embryology and the role ofpneuma, his views on gynaecology,
and his development of a theory of regimen in health, food, and lifestyle,
thus contributing to the increasing influence of doctors and medical writers
on areas such as hygiene, cookery, gymnastics and sports.
Apart from Diocles’ more specifically medical views, his relationship to
the Hippocratic writers is also manifest in two issues that reflect the ‘meta-
medical’ or philosophical nature of his approach to medicine. First, there
are the principles of Dioclean therapeutics, which are at the heart of the
question about the purposes of medical activity, and especially therapeutic
intervention, in the light of more general considerations regarding the eth-
ical aspects of medical practice and the question of the limits of doctors’
competence with regard to areas not strictly concerned with the treatment
of disease (ch. 3 ). The Hippocratic writings, and especially the famous
Oath, first of all reflect on the duties and responsibilities the doctor has in
relation to the patient, for example in articulating such famous principles
as ‘to do no harm’, not to cause death, or in advocating confidentiality,
self-restraint, discretion, gentleness, acting without fear or favour. Yet, in-
terestingly, they also emphasise the need for moral and religious integrity
of the practitioner and for correspondence between theory and practice.
Furthermore, in the field of dietetics, the Hippocratics’ development of the
notions of moderation, ‘the mean’, and the right balance between opposites
provided concepts and ways of thinking that found their way into ethical
discussions as we find them in Plato and Aristotle; and, paradoxically, their
tendency to ‘naturalise’ aspects of human lifestyle such as sexual behaviour,
physical exercise, eating and drinking patterns by presenting these in terms
of healthy or harmful provided useful arguments to those participants in
ethical debates stressing the naturalness or unnaturalness of certain forms
of human behaviour.
A further issue that occupied the interests of philosophers as well as
medical writers like the Hippocratic writers and Diocles was the question
of the location of the mind, or the question of the cognitive function of
the heart, the blood and the brain (ch. 4 ). This was a question that later
attracted great interest in Hellenistic philosophy, where medical evidence
played a major (though by no means decisive) role in the discussion, but
the way for this debate was already paved in the medical writings of the fifth
century, though in a slightly different context, for in their discussions of
disease, the Hippocratic writers frequently also discussed mental illness and
other disturbances of the mental, cognitive, behavioural or motor functions
of the body. What is striking here is that in many of these cases the authors