Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Introduction 39practical application. And it seems entirely reasonable that medicine (ratherthan, say, mathematics or astronomy) should play this part: for, on the onehand, the empirical data reflected in case histories such as the Epidemicsmust soon have reached such unmanageable proportions and such a highdegree of detail that it could not possibly be remembered; so there was aneed for storage of information based on the belief that such informationmight remain useful. On the other hand, since medicine was incessantlyconfronted with new cases in which existing knowledge had to be appliedor against which it had to be checked and, if necessary, modified, it had tobe accessible in a conveniently retrievable form.If all this is plausible, the emergence of the Hippocratic writings andespecially the variety of forms they display can be seen as a result of theneed for organisation of knowledge and research – a need arising also fromthe fact that their authors must have formed a community of scholarsrather than being single scientists working independently. This might alsosuggest an alternative explanation of why all the Hippocratic writings areanonymous (cf. p. 23): while the works of Herodotus and Hecataeus ofMiletus begin with a statement of the author’s name, and this seems alsoto have been the case with medical writers such as Alcmaeon of Croton,the Hippocratic writings do not bear the name of their authors – whichis not to deny that they are written by very self-conscious people who aremuch more prominently and explicitly present in the text (with personalpronouns and first-person verb forms) than, say, Aristotle.In the course of the fourth century the collection and organisation ofknowledge was further implemented and applied to a much broader areaby Aristotle and his pupils (or colleagues), and a similar process of datapreservation, common intellectual property and exchange of informationevidently took place in the Lyceum. 60The above points illustrate in what respects a contextual approach tomedical and philosophical texts allows a better understanding of a numberof their formal features. More could be said from a contextual point of viewabout these and other features of medical and philosophical ‘discourse’. Forexample, there is the formation of a scientific terminology and its relationto ordinary language, with stylistic and syntactic anomalies such as theuse of ‘shorthand’ (brachylogy), ‘aphoristic’ style and formulaic language,or structural characteristics such as ring composition, paragraph division,use of introductory and concluding formulae and other structuring devices.Particularly interesting is the presence or absence of the author in60 See Ostwald and Lynch (1992).