Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

102 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystusguiding principle, 3 understands this ‘causing harm’ in the sense of deliberatelyterminating a person’s life or otherwise purposively causing disadvantageto his or her situation. Thus, according to the Oath, the doctor isnot allowed to give a woman an abortive, nor to administer a lethal poison,not even when being asked to do so; and the doctor is instructed to refrainfrom every kind of abuse of the relation of trust that exists between him andthe patient. Yet it is also possible – as the word ‘or’ suggests – to take theformula in the sense of unintended harm: ‘To help, or at least to cause noharm’, that is to say, the doctor should be careful when treating the patientnot to aggravate the patient’s condition, for example in cases that are sohopeless that treatment will only make matters worse, or in cases whichare so difficult that the doctor may fail in the execution of his art; and aswe shall see, there is evidence that Greek doctors considered this possibilitytoo.In this chapter I will examine how this principle ‘to help, or to do noharm’ is interpreted in Greek medical practice and applied in cases whereit is not immediately obvious what ‘helping’ or ‘causing harm’ consists in. Iwill study this question by considering the therapeutic sections of a numberof Hippocratic writings (most of which date from the period 425–350 bce)and in the fragments of the fourth-century bce medical writer Diocles ofCarystus.2 the early history of therapeuticsIn the preface to his On Medicine (De medicina), the Roman encyclopaedicwriter Celsus (first century ce) gives an account of the early history ofmedical therapy from its beginnings in the Homeric era to the epistemologicaldispute between Dogmatists and Empiricists of his own time. Thispassage has received ample attention in scholarship, and it is not my intentionto give a detailed interpretation or an assessment of its historicalreliability. 4 Instead, I will use it as a starting-point for a consideration ofsome aspects of therapeutics in classical Greek medicine that may be subsumedunder the heading of what I would call the ‘systematic status’ oftherapy in medicine. By this I mean the position and relative importanceof therapeutics within the field of medicine as a whole, which gives rise to3 ‘I will use dietetic measures to the benefit of the patients . . . I will keep them from harm and injustice’( ).4 See the commentary by Mudry (1982); Serbat (1995) xxxviii–liii. For more general assessments ofCelsus as a source for the history of medicine see Smith (1979) 226–30 and (1989) 74–80; von Staden(1994b) 77–101 and (1999b); Stok (1994) 63–75; Temkin (1935) 249–64.