Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

86 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystusclaim: it provides an example of what Diocles regards as an ‘insufficient’causal explanation, because it is ill-founded and not based on knowledge ofthe facts (). It seems that Diocles is criticising views he believesto be erroneous rather than addressing distinct groups, each of which heldone of the views in question. Thus we may understand why Diocles insection 10 syntactically presents the two groups as different, while at thesame time marking a close connection between them (‘those who statecauses in this way’, ). Both claim one andclaim two can easily be understood as manifestations or consequences oftoo strict an application of the quest for causes, which is what claim threeamounts to. As for Diocles’ own position, if the above explanation of thewords ‘the whole nature’ and ‘by nature’ is acceptable, both sections of thefragment are closely interrelated and rooted in a consistent conviction.3 the identity of diocles’ opponentsI turn now to the question of the identity of the group or groups Diocles isopposing – a problem which has attracted more attention than the text ofthe fragment itself, especially from scholars of ancient medicine at the endof the nineteenth century such as Carl Fredrich and Max Wellmann, whoseemed to impose on Greek medicine a model which closely resemblesthe institutional organisation of the universities of their own time. Thehistory of medicine was regarded as an ongoing process of exchange of ideasbetween members of the same ‘school’, of indiscriminate acceptance of theviews of greater authorities (‘influence’) or of vigorous polemics againstthem. A striking example of this search for identification with regard to theDiocles fragment under discussion is provided by Fredrich. 28 He arguedthat Diocles, in his criticism of what I have called claim one (section 5 of thefragment), was opposing the same group as that against whom the writer (or,in Fredrich’s words, the ‘Compilator’) of the Hippocratic work On Regimen(De victu) 2.39 was polemicising. 29 However, he also argued that Diocles’criticism of what I have called the third claim (section 8) was directed against28 Fredrich(1899) 171–3.29 On Regimen 2.39 (CMG i2, 4, p.162,9–18 Joly and Byl): ‘All those who have undertaken to give ageneralising account about the power of foods and drinks that are sweet or fatty or salt or any other ofsuch nature, are wrong. For the foods and drinks that are sweet do not all have the same power, nor isthis the case with the fatty or any other such things. Some sweet foods and drinks are laxative, othersare stopping, yet others drying, yet others moistening. And in the same way, of those that are heatingand all the others some have this power, some have another. It is impossible to give a general accountof how these things are: but what power each of them individually has, I will set forth’