Group : 4 JANCY AJAYGOSH

1. GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN MEDICINE Group : 4 JANCY AJAYGOSH

2. GREEK PHILOSOPHY Greek philosophy is dominated by three very famous men: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. All three of these lived in Athens for most of their lives, and they knew each other. Socrates came first, and Plato was his student, around 400 BC. Socrates was killed in 399 BC, and Plato began his work by writing down what Socrates had taught, and then continued by writing down his own ideas and opening a school. Aristotle, who was younger, came to study at Plato's school, and ended up starting his own school as well. In the years after Plato and Aristotle died, in the 200's BC, three famous kinds of philosophy started up in the schools that Plato and Aristotle had started. These are the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epicureans. Each of these continued to be important ways of thinking about the world all the way through the Roman Empire, until people converted to Christianity in the 300's AD, and even after that

3. EMERGING OF GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN MEDICINE Of decisive importance for the development of Greek medicine was the mutual influence of philosophy and medicine. Greek natural philosophy provides one of the great landmarks in the evolution of human thought. For man to think systematically at all was undoubtedly a great step forward. But strangely enough his first systematized thoughts had not centered around earthly things, but around spirits and gods. Now, in the seventh century B.C., for the first time man emancipated himself from super naturalistic thought and tried to understand the world on a natural basis. Of course, such thought was

4. necessarily incomplete and speculative. Nevertheless it contained astonishing insights, some of which are still. basic to human thinking. Crude as the first theories were, they brought order to an infinite diversity of phenomena. Any feelings of superiority towards these speculations should be tempered by the realization that even today basic scientific assumptions such as the theory of evolution are still of a hypothetical nature. An important aspect of these early speculations was the fact that they were continually submitted to criticism rather than being frozen into religious dogmas. It is remarkable that early Greek philosophy, like early medicine, originated on the periphery of Greek civilization. This fact once again points up the role played by outside stimuli in the formation of Greek thought

5. GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN MEDICINE Only a few fragments survive concerning the ideas of the early Greek philosophers. These give the impression that the primary goal of these speculative scientists was to find one basic element which would explain the functioning of the material world. Thales of Miletus (639-544 B.C.), who predicted the solar eclipse of May 28, 585 B.C.,

6. regarded moisture as the fundamental element; Anaximenes of Miletus (570-500 B.C.) claimed this role for air; and Heraclitus of Ephesus (556-460 B.C.) chose fire. Pythagoras of Samos (580-489 B.C.), a many-sided genius who is remembered for his mathematical work and his discovery of the first acoustic laws, transcended philosophy and science in the direction of mysticism and religion.

7. This aspect of his thinking reflected an Egyptian influence. His emphasis on the symbolical importance of numbers is perhaps partially responsible for the elaborate lore of “critical days” in Greek medicine. This idea of “critical days” implies that diseases enter a decisive stage on either the fourth, seventh, eleventh, fourteenth, or seventeenth day. Pythagoras taught at Crotona in southern Italy, at the western end of the Greek world, and he probably had a strong influence on the Sicilian medical schools.

8. Empedocles of Agrigentum (504-433 B.C.) also worked in Sicily. He was probably the originator of the theory that replaced the one fundamental element of the former philosophers with four; air, fire, water, and earth. Empedocles imagined that the elements came into being through a combination of the four fundamental qualities; hot, dry, wet, and cold.

9. A further step was to identity the four basic elements with the four constituent humors of the body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These four humors originated in the heart, brain, liver, and spleen respectively.

10. This theory, through its incorporation into Hippocratic writings and its development through Aristotle and Galen, became the ruling medical theory of the Middle Ages and the following centuries. It provided the “reasons” for techniques of evacuation used long before, such as venesection, cupping, cathartics, emetics, sneezing, sweating, urination, and so on. Its popularity can probably be attributed to its simplicity.

11. A disease of the black bile, for instance, which was “dry” and “cold,” would logically be treated by “hot” and “wet” remedies. The idea that man and the universe are composed of the same elements justifies the concept of the human body as a microcosm, which mirrors the macrocosm. The microcosm-macrocosm theory fills the history of Occidental philosophy, from the predecessors of Socrates to Paracelsus, Leibniz, and the Romantics. It became the source of numerous, mostly dubious, analogies.

12. During the fifth century the interest of the Greek philosophers shifted from natural toward moral philosophy. One of the last natural philosophers, Alcmaeon of Crotona (about 500 B.C.), is one of the first Greeks known to have written on medicine. Alcmaeon advanced the theory that disease is a state of disequilibrium among the qualities of the body components. At the same time, Alemaeon was greatly interested in anatomy and embryology. He described the optical nerve, two kinds of blood vessels, and the trachea.

13. He designated the brain as the central organ of the higher activities of man. Many ancient and later writers regarded it only as a gland secreting phlegm. Another fifth-century philosopher, Democritus of Abdera (about 460 B.C.), deserves mention for his theory of the atoms as minute bodies representing the ultimate unit in the physical world. Not only has this theory been incorporated into modern science, but it also exerted great influence on many ancient medical writers.