Hippocrates in a World of Pagans and Christians, and: Galen's Methods of Healing: Proceedings of the 1982 Galen Symposium (review)

Once upon a time it seemed possible to give an account of ancient Greek philosophy in both its classical and hellenistic expressions without mentioning the word "medicine." That time has passed. First of all, this last decade has seen the fruition of many years of the production of the necessary critical editions and modern language translations by scholars such as Phillip De Lacy, D. J. Furley and J. S. Wilkie, who built on the work of a previous generation, particularly W. H. S. Jones. Also in the eighties a number of American Plato scholars, principally John Brentliner, Henry Teloh (The Development of Plato's Metaphysics), and John Moline (Plato's Theory of Understanding), put a new emphasis on the influence of presocratic cosmology generally and Hippocratic philosophy particularly to explain Plato's theory of predication, his metaphysics, his aetiology and his epistemology. This scholarship has established the importance of Hippocratic thought for classical Greek philosophy. On the basis of textual evidence, much of what nineteenth-century scholarship attributed to Pythagoreanism now seems better attributed to Hippocratic philosophy. Plato scholarship can credit Hippocratic philosophy in particular with being a wellspring of Plato's thought: eidos, like physis or dynamis, is a medical term. Indeed, Hippocratic medicine's influence on Plato's thought is so pronounced that it is difficult for us to distinguish between later signs of Hippocratic influence versus signs of Platonic influence.

Also in the last ten to fifteen years a number of scholars of the analytic school have made the radical turn to an appreciation of the history of philosophy, and found a recognizable "philosophy" in the medical writings of the Hippocratic tradition, particularly in the writings of Galen. The titles of Michael Frede's articles (e.g., "On Galen's Epistemology," "Philosophy and Medicine in Antiquity," "The Original Notion of Cause"), like those of R. J. Hankinson (e.g., "Causes and Empiricism—A Problem in the Interpretation of Later Greek Medical Method," "Evidence, Externality and Antecedence: Inquiries into Later Greek Causal Concepts"), as well that of a collection Hankinson edited (Method, Medicine and Metaphysics) tell the tale. This scholarship has explored the importance of Hippocratic thought for hellenistic Greek philosophy and beyond (i.e., Byzantine), as the work of another analytic, Mark D. Jordan, has investigated the importance of medical thought for medieval philosophy. The reader may note that although the publication date of Galen's Method of Healing is recent, it is in fact a collection of papers given at a 1982 conference on Galen's work Method of Healing and thus is representative of that "early" flurry of analytic interest in Galen's thought. As the editors remark with both relief and puzzlement, nothing has been done on this work since the conference, so the papers are still "cutting edge." As with all such collections, individual readers will find one or two papers of interest: I recommend Jonathan Barnes' "Galen on Logic and Therapy" as a description of how Galen's emphasis on logic figured in his very empirically oriented practice of medicine. The majority of the other contributions are concerned with receptions of Method of Healing.

The task of bridging the studies of Hippocratic medicine in the classical and hellenistic eras has recently been taken up by historians such as E. D. Phillips (Greek Medicine) and Wesley D. Smith (The Hippocratic Tradition), and readers should consult these books for either an understanding of the general subject of early common-era medicine, or the development of Hippocratic medicine specifically. The same kind of attempt to "bridge" the significance of Hippocratic medicine in the classical and hellenistic eras is one motivation driving Temkin's Hippocrates in a World of Pagans and...