Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

6 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquityaccessible to a wider group of scholars and students. An almost exclusivefocus on medical ideas and theories has given way to a consideration ofthe relation between medical ‘science’ and its environment – be it social,political, economic, or cultural and religious. Indeed ‘science’ itself is nowunderstood as just one of a variety of human cultural expressions, and thedistinction between ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science’ has been abandoned ashistorically unfruitful. And medicine – or ‘healing’, or ‘attitudes and actionswith regard to health and sickness’, or whatever name one prefersin order to define the subject – is no longer regarded as the intellectualproperty of a small elite of Greek doctors and scientists. There is now amuch wider definition of what ‘ancient medicine’ actually involves, partlyinspired by the social and cultural history of medicine, the study of medicalanthropology and the study of healthcare systems in a variety of culturesand societies. The focus of medical history is on the question of how a societyand its individuals respond to pathological phenomena such as disease,pain, death, how it ‘constructs’ these phenomena and how it contextualisesthem, what it recognises as pathological in the first place, what it labels asa disease or aberration, as an epidemic disease, as mental illness, and so on.How do such responses translate in social, cultural and institutional terms:how is a ‘healthcare system’ organised? What status do the practitionersor ‘providers’ of treatment enjoy? How do they arrive at their views, theoriesand practices? How do they communicate these to their colleaguesand wider audiences, and what rhetorical and argumentative techniques dothey use in order to persuade their colleagues and their customers of thepreferability of their own approach as opposed to that of their rivals? Howis authority established and maintained, and how are claims to competencejustified? The answers to these questions tell us something about the widersystem of moral, social and cultural values of a society, and as such theyare of interest also to those whose motivation to engage in the subject isnot primarily medical. As the comparative history of medicine and sciencehas shown, societies react to these phenomena in different ways, and it isinteresting and illuminating to compare similarities and differences in thesereactions, since they often reflect deeper differences in social and culturalvalues. 6From this perspective, the study of ancient medicine now starts from thebasic observation that in the classical world, health and disease were mattersof major concern which affected everyone and had a profound effect on theway people lived, what they ate and drank, how they organised their private6 See the work of G. E. R. Lloyd, especially his (1996a), (2002) and (2003).