Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

264 Aristotle and his school in one book. Furthermore, Caelius Aurelianus quotes literallyfrom a medical work De adiutoriis (‘On Remedies’, in Greek probably by Aristotle. 21 There is also evidence that Aristotlewrote a doxographical work on the causes of diseases, which served as abasis for the literary activities of the so-called Anonymus Londiniensis. 22These medical works are lost (unless survives in theform of ‘Hist. an. 10’), but there is no reason to believe that they were notwritten by Aristotle – who was, after all, the son of a doctor and in whoseworks medical analogies and metaphors are prominent. 23 The situationseems similar to that of the more specialised works on harmonics, acoustics,mechanics, optics, and so forth attributed to Aristotle in the cataloguesand the indirect transmission: 24 here, as in the case of the medical works,there is no a priori reason to believe that Aristotle did not write them. Theburden of proof lies on those who wish to deny the authenticity of theseworks, and since the works are lost, the only basis for questioning theirauthenticity seems to have been a tacit distinction between ‘philosophy’and ‘science’ and the assumption that these writings were too ‘specialised’and ‘unphilosophical’ for the mind of Aristotle, who would have left itto his pupils (such as Theophrastus, Meno and Eudemus) to deal withthe technical details. There is, however, little evidence for this assumption,which has every appearance of a prejudice and does not do justice to the factthat Aristotle’s ‘philosophical’ writings themselves contain a large amountof ‘technical’ detail. 25If we assume that On Sterility, rather than being book 10 of History ofAnimals, is one of these medical works – indeed, perhaps, the work mentioned in two catalogues of Aristotle’s writings, whichincidentally also list History of Animals as containing nine books 26 –weneed not be surprised to see divergences between it and a thoroughly theoretical,comprehensive and systematic work such as Generation of Animals.21 Acute Affections 2.13.87: Hanc definiens primo De adiutoriis libro Aristoteles sic tradendam credidit:‘Pleuritis’, inquit, ‘est liquidae materiae coitio siue densatio’.22 Anon. Lond. v37and vi 42. The Aristotelian authorship of the work of which Anon. Lond. isan adaptation is taken seriously by Manetti (1994) 47–58, and by Gigon (1983) 511. Other scholars,basing themselves on a passage in Galen’s Commentary on Hippocrates’ On the Nature of Man 1.25–6(pp. 15–16 Mewaldt; 15.25 K.), assume that this work was in fact written by Aristotle’s pupil Meno.23 This is, of course, not to say that these analogies and metaphors prove that Aristotle had medicalinterests. But the frequency of these analogies is remarkable and may be significant. For a discussionof the role of medicine in Aristotle’s thought and a bibliography on the subject see ch. 6. Littleattention has been paid to the lengthy discussion of animal diseases in Hist. an. 602 b 12–605 b 21.24 See frs. 113–16 and 123 Gigon.25 A good example of such ‘technical’ aspects is Aristotle’s discussion of various aspects of senseperceptionin Gen. an. 5.26 For further details see Balme (1985) 191.