Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

34 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquitycomprehensive systematic account), intended audience (e.g. specialists orlaymen), occasion (e.g. oral performance or written communication), andso on. Thus it has been attempted to relate varying degrees of philosophicalsophistication in some of Plato’s dialogues to differences between the audiencesfor whom they were intended (as indicated by the contribution ofthe interlocutors), 41 and something similar has been attempted with regardto differences in method – and to some extent also doctrine – between thethree treatises on ethics preserved in the Aristotelian Corpus. 42 Likewise,in some cases apparent inconsistencies in one and the same Aristotelianwork can better be accounted for on the assumption of a didactic strategyof the work and a ‘progressive character of the exposition’, 43 whereby thereader is psychagogically led to a number of new insights, which may berefinements or indeed modifications of views put forward in an earlier stageof the treatise.Similar formal characteristics of medical and philosophical texts affectingthe interpretation or evaluation of particular passages and their relationto other passages in the same work or in other works lie in the field of‘genre’, where, again, the sheer variety in forms of expression is particularlystriking. When, how and for what purposes prose came to be used forthe transmission of knowledge in the late sixth century bce and whysome writers (such as Parmenides and Empedocles, or in later times Aratusand Nicander) preferred to write in verse when prose was available as analternative, is not in all cases easy to say. Yet the Hippocratic Corpus providesopportunities to gain some idea of the process of text-production and genreformation,and one can argue that medicine has played a decisive role inthe formation of scientific literature.The variety of forms of writing referred to above is manifest alreadywithin the Hippocratic Corpus itself. Some works (e.g. most of thegynaecological texts) show hardly any organisation and present themselvesas seemingly unstructured catalogues of symptoms, prescriptions, recipes,and suchlike, though in some cases (e.g. Epidemics books 1 and 3) thislack of structure is only apparent. Other works, however (e.g. Airs, Waters,Places; On the Sacred Disease ; On the Nature of Man), show a degree of careand elaboration on account of which they deserve a much more prominentplace than they now occupy in chapters on prose in Greek literature.The Corpus Aristotelicum presents different problems. Here we do havea large body of texts generally agreed to be by one author (although there41 Rowe (1992).42 For a summary of this discussion see Flashar (1983) 244; see also Lengen (2002).43 Kahn (1966) 56.