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G R E E K RATI ONAL M E D I CI N E Ratione vero opus est ipsi medicinae (Celsus, De medicina, Proem, 48) G R E E K RATI O NAL MEDICINE Philosophy and medicine from Alcmaeon to the Alexandrians James Longrigg London and New York First published 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 1993 James Longrigg All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Longrigg, James Greek Rational Medicine: Philosophy and Medicine from Alcmaeon to the Alexandrians I. Title 610.1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Longrigg, James Greek rational medicine: philosophy and medicine from Alcmaeon to the Alexandrians/James Longrigg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Medicine, Greek and Roman. I. Title. R138.L65 1993 610´.938–dc20 92–28865 ISBN 0-203-03344-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-20793-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-02594-X (Print Edition) For Thomas and Elizabeth Contents Preface Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 viii 1 Pre-rational and irrational medicine in Greece and neighbouring cultures 6 Ionian natural philosophy and the origins of rational medicine 26 Philosophy and medicine in the fifth century I: Alcmaeon and the pre-Socratic philosophers 47 Philosophy and medicine in the fifth century II: Pre-Socratic philosophy and the Hippocratic Corpus 82 Post-Hippocratic medicine I: Medicine and the Academy 104 Post-Hippocratic medicine II: Medicine from Lyceum to Museum 149 Early Alexandrian medical science 177 Appendix: The role of the opposites in pre-Aristotelian physics 220 Notes Bibliography Index locorum General index 227 260 278 287 vii Preface The Greeks invented rational medicine. In an effort to ensure that this outstanding achievement was accorded proper recognition within our classical curriculum at the University of Newcastle, I set up ten years or so ago a course on the history of Greek medicine. It is, I believe, the only one of its kind offered within classics departments in the United Kingdom. In teaching this course it soon became apparent that my students required some assistance in disentangling the highly complex relationship between philosophy and medicine in the classical period. This book has been written with the modest hope that it might prove to be of some assistance here. Since the majority of my students have little or no knowledge of classical Greek, I have also taken the opportunity to translate and quote at some length a good many passages from our original sources of evidence. Although, in this latter respect, it has been suggested that a choice of less familiar source material would enable me to invest this book with a greater degree of novelty, I decided, however, only selectively to follow this advice. My reasons for doing so are threefold. In the first place, some of the more familiar passages illustrate the points at issue far more effectively than any alternative would do. (This, after all, is largely why these texts are familiar.) Again, I thought it would seem rather perverse to seek to illustrate inter-relationships between philosophy and medicine without reference in detail to