Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

To help, or to do no harm 103questions such as the following: Are therapeutics and medicine identical?Or is therapeutics a part of medicine, or perhaps an aim (or even the aim)of medicine? Or is therapy just one among several different activities thedoctor carries out? And how are the various components, or methods, oftherapy interrelated? Do they all have the same purpose, and are they allconsidered to be equally important? Is there a special status for dietetics(which does not necessarily aim at healing)? The answers to these questionsare by no means obvious, yet they are of fundamental importance to anunderstanding of what Greek doctors of this period were up to and whatthey believed the purposes of their activities to be.As is well known, in sections 5–8 of the proem Celsus discusses theearly period when the medical art was – in Celsus’ view perniciously –incorporated within the theoretical study of the nature of things (rerumnaturae contemplatio) and he presents, with obvious approval, Hippocratesas the one who emancipated medicine out of the bondage of philosophy(studium sapientiae), the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, which Celsusclaims to be so fundamentally harmful to the body:Ergo etiam post eos de quibus rettuli, nulli clari uiri medicinam exercuerunt donecmaiore studio litterarum disciplina agitari coepit (6) quae, ut animo praecipueomnium necessaria, sic corpori inimica est. Primoque medendi scientia sapientiaepars habebatur ut et morborum curatio et rerum naturae contemplatio subisdem auctoribus nata sit, (7) scilicet iis hanc maxime requirentibus qui corporumsuorum robora quieta cogitatione nocturnaque uigilia minuerant. Ideoquemultos ex sapientiae professoribus peritos eius fuisse accipimus, clarissimos ueroex his Pythagoran et Empedoclen et Democritum. (8) Huius autem, ut quidamcrediderunt, discipulus, Hippocrates Cous, primus ex omnibus memoria dignus,a studio sapientiae disciplinam hanc separauit, uir et arte et facundia insignis. 5After those, then, of whom I have just spoken, no man of any fame practisedthe art of medicine until literary activity began to be practised with greater zeal,(6) which, while being most necessary of all for the mind, is also harmful to thebody. At first the knowledge of healing was regarded as a part of wisdom, 6 so thatboth the treatment of diseases and the study of natural things came into beingunder the same authorities, (7) clearly because those who most required it [i.e.medicine] were those who had weakened the strength of their bodies by theirsedentary thinking and their wakeful nights. For this reason, as we hear, manyof those who claimed expertise in wisdom were experienced in it [i.e. medicine],the most famous of them indeed being Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus.(8) But a pupil of this last, as some believed him to be, Hippocrates of Cos, the5 Text according to Serbat (1995) 3–5.6 Sapientia clearly covers both science and philosophy.