Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

20 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquityadd, like all other phenomena), has its own ‘nature’, its peculiar determined,normal, stable and self-contained identity. Knowledge of this identity, andof the regularity that results from this, will allow one to recognise andunderstand individual instances of the phenomenon, to predict its futureoccurrence and by medical intervention influence it or even prevent it fromhappening or spreading. And in making this claim, the author polemicisesagainst people whom he calls ‘magicians, quacks, charlatans’, who regardthe disease as a form of whimsical, unpredictable divine intervention oreven demonic possession and whose therapeutic practice is determined bymagical beliefs and procedures. He describes the development of the diseasefrom its earliest, prenatal and indeed ancestral stages; he identifies the brainas the seat of consciousness (a theme I shall examine in greater depth inchapter 4) and as the primary organ affected by the disease; he discusses awhole range of additional factors, both internal and external, that set thedisease in motion or influence its actual development; and he gives a vividaccount of the various stages of an epileptic seizure, relating each of thesymptoms to a particular underlying physiological cause.Yet for all the emphasis on the naturalness and ‘rationality’ of his approach,we shall see in chapter 1 that the author rules out neither thedivinity of the diseases nor the possibility of divine intervention as such.He is distinguishing between an appropriate appeal to the gods for purificationfrom the ‘pollution’ (miasma) of moral transgressions (hamartēmata)that has disturbed the relationship between man and the gods, and an inappropriateappeal to the gods for the purification of the alleged pollutionof the ‘so-called sacred disease’. This is inappropriate, he says, for diseasesare not sent by a god – to say so would be blasphemous, he insists – theyare natural phenomena which can be cured by natural means, and they donot constitute a pollution in the religious sense. The text has often beenread as if the author ruled out divine ‘intervention’ as such. But in fact,there is no evidence that he does – indeed, he does not even rule out thatgods may cure diseases, if approached in the proper way and on the basisof appropriate premises.Such negative readings of the text attributing to the author the rulingout of all forms of divine intervention have presumably been inspired bya wishful belief among interpreters to ‘rationalise’ or ‘secularise’ Hippocraticmedicine – a belief possibly inspired by the desire to see Hippocraticmedicine as the forerunner of modern biomedicine, and which can be paralleledwith interpretative tendencies to ‘demythologise’ philosophers suchas Parmenides, Pythagoras and Empedocles to make them fit our conceptof ‘philosophy’ more comfortably. Yet recently, there has been a renewedappreciation of the ‘mythical’ or ‘religious’ aspects of early Greek thought,