Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

68 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystusthe competitive character of early Greek medicine). To a certain extent thismay be viewed as an attempt to ‘secularise’ the sacred disease; and fromthis point of view the positive statements about the divine character of thedisease may be regarded as reluctant or even derogatory concessions ratherthan as proclamations of a new advanced theology. And from this perspectiveit can further be understood why the author states that epilepsy is notmore divine than the other diseases instead of saying that all diseases arejust as divine as epilepsy. 56 For the purpose of clarity one might paraphrasethe author’s intention, with some exaggeration, as follows (differentiatingaccording to the two interpretations distinguished above): ‘If epilepsy isdivine, it is divine only in the sense in which all other diseases are divine;well, the only divine aspect of diseases which can be discerned is the factthat they are caused by factors which are themselves divine’ (interpretation(1)) or, on interpretation (2), ‘the only divine aspect of diseases which canbe discerned is the fact that they have a nature’. As we have seen, on thefirst interpretation of the divine character of the disease (which posits itsdivine character in its being caused by climatic factors), this restricted conceptionof divinity may well be connected with the fact that the influenceof these factors is rather limited (and with the use of the word prophasis).On the second interpretation (and on the reading ’ , ‘inthis respect they [i.e. diseases] are divine’) the emphasis is on : ‘it is(only) in this respect that they are divine’. On both views the derogatorytone of the statements can be understood from the author’s attempt tomark off the boundaries between medicine and religion and to purify theconcept of divine dispensation. And it can now also be understood why hedefines the divinity of the disease only in those contexts where he tries topoint out the difference between the sense in which his opponents believeit to be divine and the sense in which he himself believes it to be so.This does not imply that the sincerity of the author’s statements aboutthe divine character of the disease should be doubted. Nor should theirrelationship with developments in natural philosophy and with other contemporaryideas on religion and the divine be questioned. It is preciselythe philosophical search for unity and regularity in natural phenomena,the enquiry into cause and effect, and the belief, expressed by at least someof these philosophers, that in manifesting regularity and constancy thesephenomena have a divine aspect, which may have led the author to assigna divine character to the disease in question. But the danger of stressingthis relationship with natural philosophy is that we read into the text ideas56 Contra Nörenberg (1968) 26 and 49, who ignores the rhetorical impact of these statements. In 18.2( ) the emphasis is on .