Introduction 39
practical application. And it seems entirely reasonable that medicine (rather
than, say, mathematics or astronomy) should play this part: for, on the one
hand, the empirical data reflected in case histories such as theEpidemics
must soon have reached such unmanageable proportions and such a high
degree of detail that it could not possibly be remembered; so there was a
need for storage of information based on the belief that such information
might remain useful. On the other hand, since medicine was incessantly
confronted with new cases in which existing knowledge had to be applied
or against which it had to be checked and, if necessary, modified, it had to
be accessible in a conveniently retrievable form.
If all this is plausible, the emergence of the Hippocratic writings and
especially the variety of forms they display can be seen as a result of the
need for organisation of knowledge and research – a need arising also from
the fact that their authors must have formed a community of scholars
rather than being single scientists working independently. This might also
suggest an alternative explanation of why all the Hippocratic writings are
anonymous (cf. p. 23 ): while the works of Herodotus and Hecataeus of
Miletus begin with a statement of the author’s name, and this seems also
to have been the case with medical writers such as Alcmaeon of Croton,
the Hippocratic writings do not bear the name of their authors – which
is not to deny that they are written by very self-conscious people who are
much more prominently and explicitly present in the text (with personal
pronouns and first-person verb forms) than, say, Aristotle.
In the course of the fourth century the collection and organisation of
knowledge was further implemented and applied to a much broader area
by Aristotle and his pupils (or colleagues), and a similar process of data
preservation, common intellectual property and exchange of information
evidently took place in the Lyceum.^60
The above points illustrate in what respects a contextual approach to
medical and philosophical texts allows a better understanding of a number
of their formal features. More could be said from a contextual point of view
about these and other features of medical and philosophical ‘discourse’. For
example, there is the formation of a scientific terminology and its relation
to ordinary language, with stylistic and syntactic anomalies such as the
use of ‘shorthand’ (brachylogy), ‘aphoristic’ style and formulaic language,
or structural characteristics such as ring composition, paragraph division,
use of introductory and concluding formulae and other structuring de-
vices. Particularly interesting is the presence or absence of the author in
(^60) See Ostwald and Lynch ( 1992 ).