Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

52 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystusbelow). Among the ‘human’ factors determining the disease we shouldprobably also reckon the individual’s constitution (phlegmatic or choleric:2.4–5, 6.364 L.; 5.1, 6.368 L.), which depends on peculiarities and degreesof prenatal and postnatal ‘purgation’ (ch. 5), the individual’s age (chs. 8–9),the left or right side of the body (ch. 10), the length of time which haselapsed since the beginning of the disease (ch. 11), and a few minor variablefactors which the author mentions in the course of his medical account ofepilepsy.A difficulty of this view is that not all of these factors seem to be accessibleto human control or even influence, so that this connotation of anthrōpinosseems hardly applicable here. A man’s constitution, for instance, is determinedfrom his birth (5.1ff., 6.368ff. L.) and seems hardly capable of beinginfluenced by human agency (although there is no reason why even thiscould not be thought to be changeable by means of diet – but the text doesnot discuss this). Yet perhaps another association of the opposition theios–anthrōpinos has prompted the author to use it here, namely the contrast‘universal–particular’, which also seems to govern the use of theios in theHippocratic treatise On the Nature of the Woman. 19However, this interpretation is based upon several assumptions and presuppositionsdeserving consideration.Firstly, the meaning of the word phusis and the reason for mentioning itin all three passages remains unclear. If, as is generally supposed, 20 phusisand prophasis are related to each other in that phusis is the abstract conceptand prophasis the concrete causing factor (prophasies being the concreteconstituents of the phusis of a disease), then the mention of the word phusisdoes not suffice to explain the sense in which the disease is to be taken asdivine, for the nature of a disease is constituted by human factors as well.It is the fact that some of the constituents of the nature of the disease arethemselves divine which determines the divine character of the disease.Secondly, in the sentence ‘it derives its divinity from the same sourcefrom which all the others do’ (2.1: 19 On the Nature of the Woman 1 (7.312 L.); cf. Ducatillon (1977) 202–3. I refrain from a systematicdiscussion of the concept of the divine in other Hippocratic writings, partly for reasons of space butalso because such a discussion would have to be based on close analysis of each of these writingsrather than a superficial comparison with other texts. Besides, it is unnecessary or even undesirableto strive to harmonise the doctrines of the various treatises in the heterogeneous collection whichthe Hippocratic Corpus represents, and it is dangerous to use the theological doctrine of one treatise(e.g. the supposedly divine character of climatic factors in On the Sacred Disease) as evidence infavour of an interpretation of the word theios in another treatise (e.g. Prognostic; on this see n. 30below). For general discussions see Thivel (1975); Kudlien (1974); and Nörenberg (1968) 77–86.20 See Nörenberg (1968) 64–7; Lloyd (1979) 26.