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A revival of interest in ancient medicine can be attributed to the fact that classicist focus has shifted away from a concentration on classical Greece and Rome towards the more exotic worlds of Hellenistic Alexandria, the second century AD, and late antiquity. The first period saw the development of Greek anatomy while the second includes three of the great names of ancient medicine, Rufus of Ephesus and Soranus of Ephesus, and Galen. This chapter discusses the role of ancient medicine in social history, the link between philosophy and medicine, and how the feminist movement has made ancient gynaecology one of the most exciting areas of ancient medicine. It also discusses Galen's views on teleology and his use of logic in medicine. The renewal of interest in post-Aristotelian philosophy has accorded Galen the respect for his views on logic and epistemology that had been obscured for centuries by a concentration on his activities and theories as a physician.

This chapter sheds light on the developments of the Early Middle Ages in Europe. Jacob Burckhardt called the Middle Ages, an era in which the life was very colorful and rich. The remaining historical sources are unclear. The Renaissance in Europe occurred under entirely different preconditions, and was not a rebirth in the literal sense of something dead being revitalized. The ancient medicine had indeed passed away in late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages but medicine had not totally disappeared. It is easy to understand why medieval medicine narrowed ancient medicine down to only the fraction that might suffice to treat common afflictions. One could list the impulses for the so-called European Renaissance in Italy from about 1350. There were so many changes in the political landscape there that it affected thinking in art, literature, architecture, and science. The original Greek sources were translated into the conventional Latin in the twelfth century. Greeks were still present as mediators in southern Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The medicine that had developed from the pre-Socratic philosophers of nature and which had gone through a significant development between reality and plausibility now lost its importance. The knowledge of reality was hardly of any use and a new theoretical edifice was not in view. The dissolution was observed everywhere at the end of the Roman Empire. The Roman educated class retreated to the new elite stronghold of Constantinople. Galen made significant contributions to the rediscovery of the ancient medicine in the Late Middle Ages and the early modern age. The Renaissance was indeed a new beginning and the enthusiasm and spirit of departure could be felt everywhere in this era. This departure was initially much more indefinite than at the times when a new medicine was created in Chinese and Greek antiquity. There was initially no new image, neither of a new social environment nor of the body. European intellectuals again concerned themselves with redrawing the picture of antiquity.

Medicine is the linking of the knowledge of the visible with the knowledge of the invisible. The visible part covers the morphological structures of the body. These are, first of all, the gross structures that are perceptible to the naked eye such as the head, nose, belly, and legs. There are the gross structures that can be seen only if the body is opened, such as the lung, stomach, and heart. Certain minute structures are also visible, such as the structures of individual cells. The invisible includes the laws that the expressions of nature on the higher level and of the body on the lower level, are based on. It also includes the links that exist in the body between separate body parts and the recognizable functions. A creator of medicine is an observer who integrates the view of the visible with his ideas about the invisible and draws conclusions from this about how to understand, prevent, or heal illness.

Empirical philosophy begins in Greek medicine, which formulates the first imperative to use experience as an instrument of knowledge, and initiates European thinking about methods of empirical inquiry. Antiquity’s greatest thinker on empirical methods was Galen, its greatest doctor. Many leading empirical philosophers had medical training or studied medical writings and collaborated with physicians. This began when Democritus and Epicurus drew medical empiricism into natural philosophy, but their efforts were swamped by the prestigious rationalism of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The chapter also considers the empiricism of the Babylonians, and the career of empiricism under Islam.

The era of Hellenism was the first shift in early Western history. The center of power moved and the power structure changed. European medicine had emerged and persisted. The incessant changes of place and structural framework made it very difficult to find an indisputable model image for a new view of the organism in the human body. Individual authors continually came up with new thoughts and suggested new hypotheses and they introduced new teachings into medicine that ensued from their entirely personal model images. Each of these authors created impulses and drew model images out of his own subconscious experience of the world to formulate new views of the organism. Each of these authors lived in a unique environment. Each of these authors had their own totally specific, subconscious ideas of harmony and crisis, of order and chaos and how one condition turns into the other. There was no longer any world experience uniting the majority of society as had been the case during the polis democracy.

This chapter undertakes a comparison between ancient philosophy and ancient medicine, showing that in Greek works and texts of the Roman period a parallel was drawn between the therapeutic art of medicine for the body and philosophy as a form of therapy in its own right. Attention is also paid to the epistemological dimension of medicine, with a variety of thinkers taking different stances on the kind of knowledge available to medicine and its sources. Do doctors have a mere “knack” for curing like rhetoricians with their art of persuasion, or is medicine a science in the full and proper sense? Authors and traditions covered include Plato, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Pyrrhonist Skeptics, as well as medical thinkers like Diocles and Herophilus.

This chapter draws on the fifth-century BCE uses of philosophos and cognates for two purposes: as corroboration for the coinage meaning set out in Chapter 3 and the connection to Pythagoreans set out in Chapter 4, and as description of the drift in meaning the term underwent across several generations of use. It focuses on six authors, each of whom use the term once: Herodotus, Thucydides, the Hippocratic author of On Ancient Medicine, Gorgias, Aristophanes, and Lysias. Burkert already referred to these authors in his observation that philosophos did not first mean “lacking wisdom” or “spectating the universe.” Treated, however, in their respective literary and rhetorical contexts, they provide significant information about the fifth-century BCE career of the idea of being philosophos. It appears that at the end of that century, the term sometimes loses its wry implication and names a quite specific mode of dialectic exchange about matters of abstract or broad significance.

This chapter highlights some of the foundational philosophical, medical, and moral texts that account for the power of nourishment within the formation of the human person in the Greco-Roman world. Focusing primarily on Hippocratic treatises, Plato, and Aristotle, it first considers how classical anthropological theories about the relationship between body and soul broadly emphasize the importance of food in shaping human nature (both bodily and intellectually). The chapter then turns to the social and political context of the Roman Empire and its explicit program of family values within which breast-feeding and child-rearing were highly politicized—and thus highly theorized—activities. These disparate texts contribute to the discourse of human formation in antiquity. In each attempt to describe or theorize the power of food, such writings are located within a larger ideological constellation about eating and feeding, the result of which is what the book broadly identifies as the symbolic power of nourishment. This symbolic power produces a tension, or at least an ambiguity, between statements about actual nourishment and what it was specifically believed to do, on the one hand, and the symbol of nourishment as a nebulous cultural value, on the other.

This chapter examines how the Major Declamations stage epistemological conflicts between different ways of rationalizing events beyond human beings’ control, such as madness, illness, and bereavement. These conflicts are precipitated by the pronouncements of “specialist” characters, including an astrologer, a torturer, and a doctor. Since the declamatory court does not call expert witnesses, the specialists’ claims to superior technical knowledge cannot be objectively verified. Speakers accordingly present arguments regarding the relationship between the specialists’ authoritative êthos and the plausibility of their claims. The plaintiff of “The Poor Man’s Torture” (DM 7) argues that torture produces credible testimony, a claim that stands in opposition to other declamations, rhetorical handbooks, and juristic literature. “The Astrologer” (DM 4) presents a comparable divergence from ancient astrological literature, which typically resisted “hard” determinism. The speaker’s argument that astrology predicts an inevitable fate and yet one that can be avoided through suicide is contradictory. The argument against a murderous doctor made by the advocate in “The Sick Twins” (DM 8) draws not only on typical Greco-Roman prejudices against doctors but also contradicts the traditional role of the paterfamilias as family healer.

In this chapter, the author argues that hermeneutics proper is preceded by a non-textual art of interpretation and distinguishing based in sensible diagnostics, evident particularly in the medical tradition. This diakrisis places a special emphasis on touch, which is simultaneously both the “lowest” and most universal of the senses. A close reading of Aristotle’s De Anima reveals that touch is a crucial sense for our orientation in the world, and that touch cannot be reduced to immediacy or direct contact.

To substantiate and illustrate the centrality of molecular archaeology in bridging the divide between the natural sciences and the humanities, this chapter draws upon laboratory research on ‘fermentation’ and ‘ancient medicine’. Fermentation is probably the first energy system on Earth, which is embodied in the physiology of all animals including humans. It is probably the first biotechnology discovered and utilized by our species. In short, humans coevolved with microorganisms, then harnessed them to our purposes in many innovative ways—to provide alcohol as an energy source and for dissolving botanical compounds which have medicinal properties. Arguably, the most important fermentation system used by humankind was to make fermented beverages. As the universal medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance, religious symbol, artistic inspiration, and highly valued commodity, fermented beverages around the world became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopoeias, cuisines, economies, and society.

Chapter 3 examines epiphany in the context of disease and healing by focusing on the divine origins of the disease and on epiphanies as diagnostic and therapeutic tools in Greek culture. Some healing deities like Sarapis, Isis, and Herakles Alexikakos are foregrounded, but the main focus is on Asclepius and his anthropomorphic and zoomorphic epiphanies. Some parallels between the cult of Asclepius and the cult of Demeter and Kore are drawn, which naturally draws attention to the mysteric aspect of Asclepian epiphanies and the healing dimension in some of Demeter’s epiphanies. The discussion concludes with an attempt to highlight certain elemental qualities of the Asclepian epiphany and produce a typology that cuts through generic and situational contexts.

In Galen’s psychology, a post-Platonist ethical-behavioural model sits alongside physical and physiological explanations deriving from medicine and biology; and it is not always clear how the different models are harmonized. This chapter explores the problem by focusing on one particular are of his psycho physical theory, his account of the relationship between soul and body in a range of emotionally disturbed states (e.g. anger, distress, shame) which involve the heart and the blood. It explores the significance—philosophical, philosophical-historical, diagnostic—of Galen’s claim of the priority of the physical in such states. Through close consideration of a number of relevant texts, light is shed on a neglected area of Galen’s medical-philosophical thought, at the same time helping to illuminate the problematic question of Galen’s ‘models of the soul’ more generally.