Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

50 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystusare here ‘constant’, ‘unchanging’, ‘imperishable’ – not in the sense thatthe disease itself is unchanging, but in that it shows a constant patternof development. These connotations, in fact, also led the Presocraticphilosophers to apply the word to their ultimate principles. 14 The diseaseis human in virtue of being capable of treatment and cure by humanbeings, but in a more abstract sense than in the first case (see below).Both interpretations are based upon the following passages:1.2 (6.352 L.): . 15[This disease] does not seem in any respect to be more divine or more holy thanthe others. It is rather that just as the other diseases have a nature from which theyarise, likewise this one has a nature and a cause.2.1–3 (6.364 L.): . 16It seems to me that this disease is in no respect more divine than the others, butrather that just as the other diseases have a nature from which each of them arises,likewise this one has a nature and a cause, and it derives its divinity from the samesource from which all the others do, and it is in no respect less curable than theothers . . .18.1–2 (6.394 L.): 14 See Jaeger (1980) 204 (on Anaximander DK a15, b3): ‘What happens in Anaximander’s argument(and that of his successors in line) is that the predicate God, or rather the Divine, is transformed fromthe traditional deities to the first principle of Being (at which they arrived by rational investigations),on the ground that the predicates usually attributed to the gods of Homer and Hesiod are inherentin that principle to a higher degree or can be assigned to it with greater certainty.’ The predicatesin question are (‘ungenerated’), (‘imperishable’), (‘immortal’) and (‘imperishable’).15 This sentence is put between square brackets by Grensemann (1968c) ad loc. on the grounds that itis almost verbally repeated in 2.1–2 (6.364 L.), that (instead of ) is syntactically awkwardand that the sentence .(1.3) is in asyndeton with the preceding one. Each of thesearguments may be questioned: repetition of this kind is quite frequent in On the Sacred Disease (e.g.2.6, 6.366 L. and 5.1, 6.368 L.; 13.13, 6.386 L. and 18.1–2, 6.394 L.) and obviously serves an organisingpurpose; the word , to which refers, is mentioned in the immediate context, and thealternation of and is so frequent in this text that they seem practically synonymous;and the deletion of a whole sentence is more drastic than the insertion of ’. Besides, after theopening sentence ( ) it is more reasonable to expect anexposition of what the author believes than the rejection of what other people believe.16 On the sequel to this sentence, which contains an important qualification of the curability of thedisease, see below, pp. 71–2.