Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

118 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystuswith regard to the claims of dietetics and indeed medicine as a whole inthe fourth century – and, perhaps, with regard to the competence of thepractitioners of dietetics. For the Hippocratic and Dioclean conception ofmedical care, combined with a growing awareness of the need for preventionof disease by means of a healthy lifestyle, seems to have led to a rapidexpansion of the territory for which Greek physicians claimed expertise.Such a ‘medicalisation’ of daily life was strengthened by the intellectualcachet and rhetorical elegance of medicine which Celsus refers to, and towhich the extant fragments of Diocles’ works certainly testify; but it is easyto see how it may have met with resistance – an unease which is reflected,as far as the application of dietetic principles to the treatment of diseases isconcerned, by Plato’s well-known attack on dietetics in the Republic. 69In the light of such unease and doubts about the qualifications andcompetence of the practitioners of medical care, it is understandable thatdoctors started to specialise. This is illustrated by the fragment of Diocles’contemporary Mnesitheus just quoted, and also by a fragment of Erasistratus,70 in which a distinction between medicine () and the care forhealth ( ) is connected with a distinction between two differentpractitioners: the ‘healer’ () and the ‘health specialist’ (). Itis also illustrated five centuries later by Galen’s treatise Thrasybulus, whichdeals with the question ‘Whether the care for the healthy body belongsto medicine or to gymnastics’. But this specialisation, or indeed compartmentalisation,of medical care meant that the unity of therapeutics whichthe Hippocratic doctors had insisted on, was gradually lost: the distancebetween patient and doctor steadily increased – a development that hascontinued up to the present day, and which clearly goes against what Iwould still call the spirit of Hippocratic medicine.69 403 e ff., on which see Wöhrle (1990) 122–4.70 Fr. 156 Garofalo.