Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on sleep and dreams 195attention to the study of the human body. Therefore the student of politics shouldalso study the nature of the soul, though he will do so with a view to these subjects,and only so far as is sufficient for the objects he is discussing; for further precisionis perhaps more laborious than our purposes require. (1102 a 18–26)It turns out that both doctors and natural scientists are called ‘distinguished’by Aristotle in virtue of their tendency to cross the boundaries of their owndiscipline. For the doctors, this means that they take an interest in the bodyas a whole 43 and build their procedures on theoretical knowledge of thecauses of bodily processes and the structures and functions of the parts thebody consists of. Aristotle praises them for this and, as a consequence, acknowledgesthat these doctors may even contribute to the study of nature. 44This is probably the ‘overlap’ mentioned in the passage in On Respiration.It is at least one of the reasons why he takes their view about the relevanceof dreams for his discussion of prophecy in sleep quite seriously. It is notdifficult to imagine the candidates to whom these expressions may refer:the writers of On Regimen and On Fleshes would no doubt come into thepicture, and outside the Hippocratic corpus perhaps Diocles. 45The wording of the passage further implies that according to Aristotlenot all doctors belong to this group: there are also doctors who primarily orexclusively rely on experience and who are ignorant of – or even explicitlyhostile towards – theoretical presuppositions. A similar distinction betweenmore or less theoretical approaches in the sciences is made in Metaphysics1.1, where Aristotle uses the example of medicine to distinguish between the‘master craftsmen’ (architektones) and the ‘handworkers’ (cheirotechnai); theformer are the real possessors of a technē in that they know (in the case ofmedicine) the causes of diseases and of the effects of therapeutic measures,so that they can give an account of why they are curing a patient in a particularway, but the latter only work on the basis of experience 46 – although43 The background of this passage is provided by a passage in Plato’s Charmides (156 b 3–c 5), wheremention is made of the ‘good physicians’ (hoi agathoi iatroi) who practise their discipline from abroader, more theoretical perspective.44 This is a remarkably generous statement, but it remains a far cry from the opinion of the author ofthe Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine ch. 20, who says that medicine is the only way to arriveat knowledge of nature.45 See Diocles, fragments 52 and 61 vdE.46 Metaph. 981 a 12–b 14. Perhaps the distinction of charientes iatroi also has a social aspect, in that theybelong to a higher class. As for a ‘class distinction’ of doctors as made by Aristotle in Pol. 1282 a 3–4(on which see Kudlien 1985), however, it seems to me – for the reasons mentioned – that they arecloser to the iatroi architektonikoi than to the iatroi pepaideumenoi, for the latter are generalists withan encyclopaedic knowledge of medicine rather than experienced practitioners. The use of the wordpepaideumenos by Aristotle usually has to do with an awareness of the methodological limits of acertain discipline (see Jori 1995), whereas the word charieis is used to refer to people who enrich theirdiscipline by crossing its boundaries; on the other hand, in the passage from Nicomachean Ethics