Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Introduction 7and public hygiene and healthcare, and how they coped – physically as wellas spiritually – with pain, illness and death. In this light, the emergenceof Greek ‘rational’ medicine, as exemplified in the works of Hippocrates,Galen, Aristotle, Diocles, Herophilus, Erasistratus and others, was oneamong a variety of reactions and responses to disease. Of course, this is notto deny that the historical significance of this response has been tremendous,for it exercised great influence on Roman healthcare, on medieval and earlymodern medicine right through to the late nineteenth century, and it isarguably one of the most impressive contributions of classical antiquity tothe development of Western medical and scientific thought and practice.But to understand how it arose, one has to relate it to the wider culturalenvironment of which it was part; and one has to consider to what extentit in turn influenced perceptions and reactions to disease in wider layersof society. The medical history of the ancient world comprises the role ofdisease and healing in the day-to-day life of ordinary people. It covers therelations between patients and doctors and their mutual expectations, thevariety of health-suppliers in the ‘medical marketplace’, the social positionof healers and their professional upbringing, and the ethical standards theywere required to live up to. 7 And it also covers the material history ofthe ancient world, the study of diseases and palaeopathology; for in orderto understand reactions to the pathological phenomena, and to explaindifferences between those reactions, it is obviously of vital importance toestablish with as much certainty as possible the nosological reality of ancientGreece and the Eastern Mediterranean. 8As a result of these developments – and greatly helped by scholarly effortsto make the subject more accessible by means of modern translationsof the original texts – increasing numbers of students of the Greek andRoman world have now embraced ancient medicine as a new area of researchwith very interesting implications for the wider study of classicalantiquity. It is almost by definition an interdisciplinary field, involvinglinguists and literary scholars, ancient historians, archaeologists and environmentalhistorians, philosophers and historians of science and ideas, butalso historians of religion, medical anthropologists and social scientists.Thus, as we shall see in the next pages, medical ideas and medical textshave enjoyed a surge of interest from students in ancient philosophy andin the field of Greek and Latin linguistics. Likewise, the social and culturalhistory of ancient medicine, and the interface between medicine, magic7 See, e.g., Nutton (1992) and (1995).8 See Grmek (1983) and (1989); Sallares (1991) and (2003).