Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Introduction 19philosophically inspired medicine that we find in the Hippocratic writingson the one hand and what is sometimes called the ‘folk medicine’ practisedby drugsellers, rootcutters and suchlike on the other, but even among moreintellectual, elite physicians themselves. One of the crucial points on whichthey were divided was precisely the ‘philosophical’ nature of medicine – thequestion of to what extent medicine should be built on the foundation of acomprehensive theory of nature, the world and the universe. It is interestingin this connection that one of the first attestations of the word philosophiain Greek literature occurs in a medical context – the Hippocratic workOn Ancient Medicine – where it is suggested that this is not an area withwhich medicine should engage itself too much. It is clear from the contextthat what the author has in mind is approaches to medicine that take astheir point of departure a general theory about ‘nature’ (phusis), more inparticular theories that reduce all physical phenomena to unproven ‘postulates’(hupotheseis), such as the elementary qualities hot, cold, dry and wet– theories which the author associates with the practice of Empedocles,who reduced natural phenomena to the interaction and combinations ofthe four elements earth, fire, water and air. The polemical tone of thetreatise suggests that such ‘philosophical’ approaches to medicine were becomingrather popular, and this is borne out by the extant evidence suchas that provided by the Hippocratic treatises mentioned above. There werea number of medical authors for whom what we call ‘philosophy’ wouldnot have been an inappropriate term to describe their projects – regardlessof whether or not they knew and used the term.To this group certainly belongs the author of the treatise which is deservedlyone of the most famous writings in the Hippocratic Corpus, Onthe Sacred Disease. As I alluded to above, this work has long been readas the paradigm of Greek fifth-century rationalism. And it is certainlytrue that this author, in claiming that epilepsy ‘has a nature’, is doingsomething very similar to what the Presocratics did in inquiring into the‘nature’ (phusis) of things, namely their origin, source of growth and identifyingstructure – be they earthquakes and solar eclipses, or bodily processesand changes, illnesses, conditions, affections, symptoms, or substances likefoods, drinks, drugs and poisons and the effects they produced on the bodiesof human beings. And just like Ionian philosophers such as Anaximenesand Anaxagoras in their explanations of earthquakes, solar eclipses, thunderstormsand other marvellous phenomena, he produces a ‘natural’ explanationfor a phenomenon – in his case ‘the so-called sacred disease’,epilepsy – that used to be seen as the manifestation of immediate divineagency. Epilepsy, the author argues, like all other diseases (and, one may