Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

On the Sacred Disease 51 ’ ’ , ’ .This disease which is called sacred arises from the same causes as the others, fromthe things that come and go away and from cold and sun and winds that changeand never rest. These things are divine, so that one ought not to separate thisdisease and regard it as being more divine than the others; it is rather that all aredivine and all are human, and each of them has a nature and a power of its own,and none is hopeless or impossible to deal with.The first interpretation is mainly based upon the remark ‘these things aredivine’ ( ’ , 18.2); ‘these things’ is taken as a reference tothe ‘causes’ () mentioned in the previous sentence, ‘the thingsthat come and go away, etc.’ ( .). Theauthor derives the divinity of the disease from the divinity of its causes,the climatic factors whose influence has been discussed in 10.2ff. (cold andheat; 6.378ff. L.) and chapter 13 (winds), and hinted at in 8.1 (6.374 L.),8.7 (6.376 L.), 9.4 (6.378 L.) and 11.1 (6.380–2 L.). And since these factorsare – as the author claims – the causes of all diseases, all diseases are equallydivine, so that none of them should be distinguished from the others asbeing more divine.At the same time all diseases are anthrōpina, ‘human’. It is not statedexplicitly in either of these passages in what sense they are human, 17 but ithas been suggested that diseases are caused (or at least determined in theirdevelopment) by human factors as well. 18 These factors are not mentionedhere, probably for the very reason that they do not constitute the divinecharacter of the disease, which is the important issue here, and, perhaps,because the importance of these factors varies from one disease to another,which explains why they cannot be included in ‘the same causes’ ( ). For these reasons, for instance, the brain ( ) is not mentioned in chapter 18, although the writer had stated earlier(3.1) that it is the brain which is causally responsible () for thisdisease (and for all important diseases), a claim which he has substantiatedat length in the preceding chapters 14–17 (on this, as on possibledifferences of meaning between and , see pp. 59–6017 This may be due to the polemical context: some diseases are called divine by the opponents, whileothers are therefore regarded as human. But in the author’s view all diseases are both divine andhuman: the explanandum is not that all diseases are human, but in what sense all diseases are divineas well.18 Nörenberg (1968) 714; Nestle (1938) 3–4.