Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Heart, brain, blood, pneuma 125taken by the fifth-century medical writer Alcmaeon of Croton (South Italy),who was thought to be the first to discover the existence of the optic nerve,by the author of the Hippocratic work On the Sacred Disease, and by Plato(in the Timaeus). The cardiocentric view was represented in the Hippocraticwritings On Diseases 2 (fifth century bce), On the Heart (end of thefourth/start of the third century bce) and by Aristotle, Diocles of Carystusand Praxagoras of Cos (fourth century bce). The haematocentric view wastaken by Empedocles and the authors of the Hippocratic writings On Diseases1 and On Breaths (all fifth century bce). Although this division maybe largely appropriate in terms of the period concerned, it is already toomuch a product of the schematisation mentioned above, which becamecharacteristic of the debate in later doxography. Strictly speaking, only theauthors of On the Sacred Disease and On the Heart express an opinion on thelocation of what they consider the highest psychic faculty, the former choosingthe brain, the latter the heart. Apart from this, the division into threeareas presents the matter in too static a way: most of the authors mentionedappear to regard psychic activities mainly as processes, in which some parts ofthe body are more involved than others, but which are in principle based onthe interaction between a number of anatomical and physiological factors.It would be better to ask in which terms ancient doctors from the fifthand fourth centuries bce thought about these matters, and which types ofarguments they used to substantiate their views. The following categoriescan be discerned:faculties (thought, perception, feeling, etc.)parts of the body (heart, brain, diaphragm, etc.)substances (blood, air, phlegm, etc.)processes (decay, constipation, etc.)relations/proportions (balance, mixture, etc.)In the discussions which doctors devote to the subject, they employ termsthat on the one hand refer to a certain part of the body or otherwiseanatomical-physiological material, and on the other hand to an activityor faculty exercised or enabled by it: the part of the body ‘contributes to’,is ‘the instrument of’ or ‘the material substrate of’ a ‘faculty’ or ‘ability’.It is not always immediately obvious to what extent the medical authorsmade a distinction between ‘mental’ processes as such and physiologicalprocesses. 14 Most authors of the Hippocratic Corpus appear to assume akind of continuum between body and mind: in lists of symptoms, psychologicalphenomena are mentioned among purely physical ones without any14 See the discussion in Singer (1992) 131–43.