Ancient Greek Medicine
Key beliefs about the body, health, and illness
What wasn’t original about Greek medicine before the Common Era?
Influenced by ancient medical cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia (as well as those of China and India)
Egyptian papyruses as old as 3000 BC show extensive medical knowledge and pharmacopoeia
Informed by deification of nature
"Golden Age" of Ancient Greece ~480-400 BCE
Nation of "city-states" of which Athens was the most powerful one (rival was Sparta)
Period of great development in science, humanities, and social systems
Today’s lecture is the first of two on medicine in the Greek Golden Age and in the Hellenistic Age that followed it.
2nd lecture will be two weeks from today.
What was original about Greek medicine before the Common Era?
emphasis on non-supernatural causes of illness rather than the gods
emphasis on rationality and independent judgment, learning, and ethics; willingness to speculate
pluralism and heterogeneity
Greek Theories of Universe
Pythagoreans
Basis of the universe and all in it is number and proportion
Heraclitans
World consists of fire, earth, and water in constant balanced change—"you cannot step in the same river twice"
Leucippus and Democritus
World made of atoms and void
Greek theories of the universe, 2
Empedocles
World built from earth, air, fire, water in mixture (blood is mix of all four)
Anaxagoras
Original mixture of the universe=diverse ingredients combined to make seeds—each has within it parts of everything else—can grow and change
Theories of the universe produced theories of the human body—and vice versa.
Example:
Alcmaeon of Croton (470 BCE)
sensation transmitted through eyeballs to brain through pneuma, a form of air or spirit
(later, Pneumatists affirmed a fifth "super-element" that permeated and controlled the universe)
Greek Medicine: Pluralism and Heterogeneity
Greek medicine was an "open system"—
No established "medical profession"
Rationalism coexisted with
Open to intellectual influences
Accessible to non-healers
Site of debate and discussion, philosophy and rhetoric (persuasion)
Healing Brotherhoods
Groups of healers or "cults" incl. Asclepiads
Locations famous for their healers
Sometimes site of inside knowledge passed to select few
Sometimes taught to anyone who could pay
Hippocrates of Cos (467-377 BCE)
Cos one of few sites with reputation for healers
Hippocrates was an Asclepiad of Cos
Belief in treating "the whole"
Whole body?
Person plus environment?
Unclear as little is known about him
Hippocratic Corpus
60 plus medical works attributed to Hippocrates and his circle
Written between 420-350 BCE
Assembled at Alexandria, Egypt in 280 BCE
Impossible to decide which works are definitely written by Hippocrates
Clear that not all of them are, given contradictions
Hippocratic Theories
Consistencies despite differences in texts:
Bodily processes can be explained like other natural phenomena: not in terms of the gods
Man is part of ordered physical cosmos
Health/illness result from balance and imbalance
External or internal disruptions produce pain and illness
Humors
Balance of human bodily system is balance of 4 humors:
Blood
Bile (Yellow Bile)
Black Bile
Phlegm
Blood
Season: spring
Age: childhood
Element: air
(etc.)
Bile
Season: Summer
Age: Youth
Element: Fire
Etc.
Black Bile
Season: Autumn
Age: Adulthood
Element: Earth
Etc.
Phlegm
Season: Winter
Age: Old Age
Element: Water
Imbalance of Humors
Imbalances categorized as
Deficiencies
Excesses
of humoral elements
Product of regimen (person) or air (environment)
Treatments
Principles used to predict dominance of humor in each season/age
Precautions taken
Treatments based on diet and regimen first, drugs only as a last resort
Individualized to the patient
Some Key Texts of the
Hippocratic Corpus
"On the Nature of Man"
Theories of humoral medicine
"The Sacred Disease"
Refutes supernatural explanation of epilepsy and argues for humoral causes instead
"The Hippocratic Oath"
Probably not written by Hippocrates of disciples
Still often treated if associated with Hippocrates, and still central document in art of medicine
Thinking back:
The ideas of Hippocrates and his disciples present a contrast to the explanation of suffering and physical illness proposed by the Book of Job. Part of the difference is that one represents philosophy of medicine and one is a devotional and literary text. The overall contrast in views of the causes of misfortune, however, is worth noting. Pay attention to Philoctetes in this regard.
Also…
Think as well (put it on the back burner) how literary texts bring different tools to the problem of how to explain human suffering and embodied experience in general.