Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Heart, brain, blood, pneuma 133through the mouth, as is likely. For the air, passing through the vessels, itself risesand brings up with it the thinnest part of the blood. The moisture mixing with theair becomes white, for the air being pure is seen through thin membranes. For thisreason the foam appears completely white. When then will the victims of this diseaserid themselves of their disorder and the storm that attends it? When the bodyexercised by its exertions has warmed the blood, and the blood thoroughly warmedhas warmed the breaths, and these thoroughly warmed are dispersed, breaking upthe congestion of the blood, some go out along with the respiration, others withthe phlegm. The disease finally ends when the foam has frothed itself away, theblood has re-established itself, and calm has arisen in the body. 33The structure of this explanation is very similar to the one found in Onthe Sacred Disease, yet there is a significant difference: air is not obstructedin its course, but air itself is the obstructing factor. Air causes the bloodto become chilled, it flows more slowly and therefore it is less capable ofproviding the body with ‘consciousness’. Another interesting factor is thecomparison with sleep: a non-pathological state is employed to illustrate amore serious disorder resulting from the same physiological mechanism. 34The association with sleep returns in Aristotle, who dwells briefly onthe subject of epilepsy in his treatise On Sleep and Waking (De somno etvigilia, Somn. vig.). Aristotle considers sleep a form of epilepsy, albeit not apathological one. Sleep is a result of the digestion of food: after consumptionfood is carried to the centre of the body and ‘cooked’ or digested by theheat of the heart. The process of cooking gives rise to the evaporation(anathumiasis) of food; the air (pneuma), saturated by these hot vapours, iscarried upwards from the heart to the brain and causes the head to becomeheavy. The brain causes these vapours to be chilled and return to the heart.Thus the heart is chilled, which is what actually causes the sensory facultiesto fail (the ‘formal cause’, i.e. the definition of sleeping). 35Sleep arises from the evaporation due to food . . . Young children sleep deeply,because all the food is borne upwards. An indication of this is that in early youththe upper parts of the body are larger in comparison with the lower, which is dueto the fact that growth takes place in the upward direction. Hence too they areliable to epilepsy, for sleep is like epilepsy; indeed, in a sense, sleep is a typeof epileptic fit. This is why in many people epilepsy begins in sleep, and theyare regularly seized with it when asleep, but not when awake. For when a largeamount of vapour is borne upwards and subsequently descends again, it causesthe blood vessels to swell and it obstructs the passage through which respirationpasses. (Somn. vig. 457 a 4–11)33 On Breaths 14.1–4 (6.110–12 L.), tr. Jones in Jones and Withington (1923–31) vol. ii, modified.34 For the ambivalent status of sleep in ancient medicine see Debru (1982) 30.35 For precise details of this process see Wiesner (1978) 241–80.