Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Galen on qualified experience 295potential or virtual states present in the substance whose actualisation isdependent on the circumstances, for example the nature of the particulartriggering factors? 66It is not completely clear, at least not to me, which of these optionsGalen preferred. In book 3 of On Mixtures, he repeatedly mentions thecondition that ‘no external agent should interfere with or impede’ ( ) the process of a (‘power’or ‘potentiality’) developing into an (‘actuality’); 67 and in Onthe Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs he stresses the connotations ofstability and regularity which he apparently considers to be inherent in thenotion of ( ). 68 But there is also someevidence, albeit of a rather indirect nature, in favour of the second option. 69A third possibility would be to include the in the definition ofthe , for example by saying that the power of honey-wine is ‘beinglaxative under such and such conditions’. 70At the core of this problem lies a certain ambiguity in the word which also occurs in earlier Greek medical thinking 71 and which, if I ampermitted to venture a rather speculative statement, might be seen as a notcompletely successful attempt at applying the Aristotelian distinction between and to the area of dietetics and pharmacology. Forit makes a great difference whether this distinction is applied to a situationin which something has the power to become something else (to change ina passive sense, i.e. to undergo change or be changed) or to a situation inwhich something has the power to cause something to undergo change or be66 Cf. De temper. 3.1 (p. 89.1–14 Helmreich, 1.651 K.); De simpl. med. fac. 3.20 (11.602f.K.).67 De temper. 3.1 (p. 86.14–15 Helmreich, 1.647 K.); 3.1 (p. 87.5–6 Helmreich, 1.647 K.).68 De simpl. med. fac. 1.2–3 (11.384 K.).69 See De simpl. med. fac. 1.3 (11.384 K.): ‘And perhaps on some occasion you will say that water notonly has the power of cooling, but also of heating. For on some occasions it is evidently cooling in allcircumstances, whenever we come into contact with it, but on many other occasions it has effecteda heating reaction. One should therefore not leave these things without qualification for any drugthat is being examined, as I have said in On Mixtures’ ’ . A clearer example is De simpl. med. fac. 7.10 (12.36 K.): ‘Corianderconsists of opposite powers: it has much bitterness, which was shown to reside in its fine and earthytexture, but it also has the power to produce quite a bit of watery, fatty moisture, and it also hassomething astringent’ [ ] . See also De alim. facult. 1.1.11(CMG v4, 2, p.205.16–23 Helmreich, 6.460 K.).70 See the passage from De alim. facult. 1.1 quoted in n. 65 above71 It can also be detected in the Hippocratic Corpus and in Diocles; see ch. 2 in this volume, pp. 79 ff.