Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Introduction 13were exclusively on the receiving end: theories about causation or inferencefrom signs constitute good examples of areas in which major theoreticaland conceptual distinctions were first formulated in medical discourse andsubsequently incorporated in philosophical discussions. 20It would therefore be quite wrong to regard Aristotle’s and Galen’s perceptionsof the overlap between medicine and philosophy as anachronisticdistortions or projections of their own preoccupations, or to believe that,when ‘philosophers’ had medical interests, these were nothing more thaneccentric curiosity. To the Greek thinkers, areas such as those mentionedabove represented aspects of natural and human reality just as interestingand significant as the movements of the celestial bodies, the origins of earthquakesor the growth of plants and trees, and at least equally revealing ofthe underlying universal principles of stability and change. Nor were theirinterests in the medical area limited to theoretical study or the pursuit ofknowledge for its own sake without extending to ‘clinical’ or ‘therapeutic’practice. Some are known to have put their ideas into practice, such asEmpedocles, who seems to have been engaged in considerable therapeuticactivity, or Democritus, who is reported to have carried out anatomicalresearch on a significant scale, or, to take a later example, Sextus Empiricus,who combined his authorship of philosophical writings on Scepticism withmedical practice.Such connections between theory and practical application, and suchcombinations of apparently separate activities, may still strike us as remarkable.Nevertheless we should bear in mind, first, that especially in theperiod up to about 400 bce (the time in which most of the better-knownHippocratic writings are believed to have been produced), ‘philosophy’ washardly ever pursued entirely for its own sake and was deemed of considerablepractical relevance, be it in the field of ethics and politics, in the technicalmastery of natural things and processes, or in the provision of healthand healing. Secondly, the idea of a ‘division of labour’ which, sometimesimplicitly, underlies such a sense of surprise is in fact anachronistic. Wemay rightly feel hesitant to call people such as Empedocles, Democritus,Pythagoras and Alcmaeon ‘doctors’, but this is largely because that termconjures up associations with a type of professional organisation and specialisationthat developed only later, but which are inappropriate to theactual practice of the care for the human body in the archaic and classicalperiod. The evidence for ‘specialisation’ in this period is scanty, for doctors20 See, e.g., Hankinson (1987) on the role of the Pneumatist physician Athenaeus of Attalia in thedevelopment of the notion of antecedent causation.