Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

32 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquitythe situation in which a text has, or is supposed to have, functioned, forexample the audience for whom it is intended (as distinct from the audienceby whom it has actually been received), the conditions in which it hasbeen produced, ‘published’ and performed, the medium in which it hasbeen transmitted, and so on. Here, again, discourse studies and ethnographyof literature have provided useful instruments of research, for exampleD. Hymes’ analysis of the ‘speech event’ into a number of components thatcan, not without some irony, be listed according to the initial letters of theword speaking:setting (time, place, and other circumstances),scene (e.g. didactic, general or specialised audience, informal communicationor festive occasion),participants (speaker/writer, hearer/reader, addressee),ends (objective of communication, e.g. conveying information, persuasion,entertainment),act sequences (style, linguistic structure of the speech act),keys (tone of communication, e.g. ironic, emotional),instrumentalities (medium of communication: oral/written, letter/fax/e-mail, illustrations, dialect, technical language),norms (stylistic, social, scholarly),genres. 35Though not all of these components are equally relevant in each particularcase, models like this do provide a heuristic framework which may be helpfulto the understanding of the actual linguistic form of any text, including scientifictexts. A recent German collection of articles on ‘Wissensvermittlung’(‘transmission of knowledge’) in the ancient world gives an impressionof the kind of questions and answers envisaged from such an integratedapproach. 36 Thus a number of syntactic peculiarities of texts like some ofthe ‘case histories’ of patients in the Hippocratic Epidemics might better beaccounted for on the assumption that they represent private notes madeby doctors for their own use; but further refinement of such an explanationcomes within reach when stylistic variations within the Epidemics arerelated to a development in scientific writing towards greater audienceorientedness.At this point, a most fortunate connection can be perceived betweenlinguistically inspired approaches within classical philology and the recentsurge of a ‘contextual’ approach in the history of science, whereby the textis seen as an instrument for scientists and practising doctors to use to define35 Hymes (1972) 58ff. 36 Kullmann and Althoff (1993).