Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Introduction 11of their own subject, medical authors such as Galen – who wrote a treatiseadvocating the view that the best doctor is, or should be, at thesame time a philosopher – and the so-called Anonymus Londiniensis (thefirst-century ce author of a medico-doxographical work preserved on papyrus)treated Plato’s views on the human body and on the origins ofdiseases as expounded in the Timaeus on a par with the doctrines of majorGreek medical writers; and Aristotle and Theophrastus continued tobe regarded as authorities in medicine by medical writers of later antiquitysuch as Oribasius and Caelius Aurelianus. Conversely, as we shallsee in chapter 6, a philosopher such as Aristotle commented favourablyon the contributions by ‘the more distinguished doctors’ to the areaof ‘natural philosophy’. And in the doxographical tradition of ‘Aëtius’,in the context of ‘physics’ or ‘natural philosophy’, a number of medicalwriters such as Diocles, Herophilus, Erasistratus and Asclepiades arecited alongside ‘philosophers’ such as Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics for theirviews on such topics as change, the soul, the location of the ruling part of thesoul (see chapter 4), dreams, respiration, monstrosities, fertility and sterility,twins and triplets, the status of the embryo, mules, seventh-month children,embryonic development, and the causes of old age, disease and fever. 19The subtitle of this volume, ‘nature, soul, health and disease’ indicatessome of the more prominent areas in which such interaction between‘philosophers’ and medical writers was most clearly visible. It is no coincidencethat Aristotle’s comments on the overlap between ‘students ofnature’ and ‘doctors’ are made in his own Parva naturalia, a series of workson a range of psycho-physiological topics – sense-perception, memory,sleep, dreams, longevity, youth and old age, respiration, life and death,health and disease – that became the common ground of medical writersand philosophers alike. And, not surprisingly, Aristotle makes similar remarksin his zoological works concerning questions of anatomy, such as theparts of the body and structures like the vascular system, and embryology,especially the question of the origins of life, the mechanisms of reproductionand the ways in which inherited features are passed on from onegeneration to another, the question of the male and female contributionto the reproductive process, the origin of the semen, questions of fertilityand infertility (see chapter 9), stages of embryonic development, the waythe embryo is nourished, twins and triplets, and suchlike. This whole areawas referred to in later antiquity as ‘the nature of man’, particularly man’sphysical make-up, ranging from the lowest, most basic level of ‘principles’19 See Runia (1999).