Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

266 Aristotle and his schoolof , ‘right proportion’, between the hotness of the seed and thecoldness of the menstrual blood). Indeed, in the course of this discussion,we are told by Aristotle that also determines whether there isgoing to be any offspring at all – which raises the question why Aristotlehas not mentioned it earlier. 31Now the topic of ‘Hist. an. 10’ is precisely such a disturbance of a vitalfunction: the power to generate offspring. As the first sentence says, thepurpose of the treatise is to identify whether the causes of this disturbancelie in both partners or in one of them, so that on the basis of this an appropriatetreatment can be determined: ‘The cause of a man and a woman’sfailure to generate when they have intercourse with each other, when theirage advances, lies sometimes with both, sometimes only in either of them.Now first one should consider in the female the state of things that concernthe uterus, so that it may receive treatment if the cause lies in it, butif the cause does not lie in it attention may be given to another one ofthe causes.’ 32 It is true that in what follows the author frequently refers tothe normal, healthy state of the relevant bodily parts, but this is becausehis procedure consists in eliminating potential causes in order to facilitatea diagnosis of the actual cause of the disturbance: if something functionsnormally, it can be ruled out as a cause of the disturbance. This procedure isvery clearly expressed in 636 b 6–10: ‘But where none of these impedimentsis present but the uterus is in the state that we have described, if it is notthe case that the husband is the cause of the childlessness or that both areable to have children but are not matched to each other in simultaneousemission but are very discordant, they will have children.’ 33 It is as if theauthor has in mind a routine medical examination, in which one would31 Gen. an. 767 a 25. (I owe this observation to Sophia Elliott, who has dealt with this tension inAristotle’s thought in her Cambridge PhD dissertation.) To be sure, Aristotle had briefly alluded tothe principle of in 723 a 29–33, but this is in a polemical context and it is not elaborated.It is interesting to note that in ‘Hist. an. 10’ the principle of is applied to generationwithout qualification (636 b 9), whereas in Generation of Animals it is introduced when the questionof what the offspring will be like is at stake (767 a 24), although in the sequel it is also brought tobear on the issue of fertility.32 ’ ’ (633 b 12–17) (tr. Balme, slightlymodified).33 ’ . . . (tr. Balme). See also 635 a 31–2:‘Concerning the mouth of the uterus, then, those are the grounds from which to consider whetherit is in the required state or not’ , tr. Balme).