Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

On the Sacred Disease 53 ), we have to suppose, on this interpretation, thatwhen writing ‘the same source’ ( ) the author means the climaticfactors, whose influence is explained later on in the text (see above) andwhose divine character is not stated before the final chapter. Now if a writersays: ‘this disease owes its divine character to the same thing to whichall other diseases owe their divine character’, it is rather unsatisfactoryto suppose that the reader has to wait for an answer to the question ofwhat this ‘same thing’ is until the end of the treatise. This need not bea serious objection against this interpretation, but it would no doubt bepreferable to be able to find the referent of in the immediatecontext.Thirdly, this interpretation requires that in the sentence ‘from the thingsthat come and go away, and from cold and sun and winds that changeand never rest’ (18.1: )the second kai (‘and’) is taken in the explicative sense of ‘that is to say’. Ina sequence of four occurrences of kai this is a little awkward, since thereis no textual indication for taking the second kai in a different sense fromthe others. Yet perhaps one could argue that this is indicated by the shiftfrom plural to singular without article, and by the fact that the expression‘the things that come and those that go away’ is itself quite general: it maydenote everything which approaches the human body and everything whichleaves it, such as food, water or air, as well as everything the body excretes. 21On this line of reasoning, this expression would then be specified into thefollowing items: cold, sun and winds; without this specification food, airand water as well as the corresponding excretions would be divine too,which seems unlikely. 22 Besides, it must be conceded that the specificationof ‘the things that come and go away’ ( )as the climatic factors mentioned is not without justification. At the end of21 is a common expression for excretions: cf. Epidemics 1.5 (2.632 L.) and 3.10 (3.90 L.;for other instances see Kühn and Fleischer, Index Hippocraticus s.v.); in this sense the word is usedin On the Sacred Disease 5.8 (6.370 L.) as well (though this is Grensemann’s emendation of the MSSreading ). Against this specialised interpretation cf. Ducatillon (1977) 202: ‘L’adjectif qui nousintéresse [i.e. theios, PJvdE] s’applique ici à de nombreux objets. Il caractérise d’une part ce qui entredans le corps et ce qui en sort, c’est à dire l’air et les aliments, d’autre part le froid, le soleil, les vents,bref, les conditions climatiques et atmosphériques; c’est donc la nature entière, considérée commeune réalité matérielle qui est proclamée divine.’22 As G. E. R. Lloyd reminds me, it could be argued that the divinity of air, water and food need notbe surprising in the light of the associations of bread with Demeter, and wine with Dionysus (cf.Prodicus DK b5). But even if these associations apply here (which is not confirmed by any textualevidence), the unlikelihood of the divinity of the ‘things that go out of the body’ ( )remains.