MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

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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
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