In the Greek tradition, the “idea that logos is to illnesses of the soul as medical treatment is to illnesses of the body” is found as early as Homer. Indeed, the connection between the two fields may be much older, extending back into realms of Paleolithic shamanism that can no longer be clearly seen. As Eliade says, “The principal function of the shaman in Central and North Asia is magical healing.” He speaks of the shaman’s function in terms of “disease” and “treatment,” “illness” and “cure.” A shaman’s healing function seems to have been closely bound up with his account of the world and the individual’s place in it, both before and after death. This account was his “logos,” which may have begun in mythology but culminated in philosophy. Pindar and Aeschylus both recognize the connection, and some of the pre-Socratics featured it, above all Empedocles (who says his poem provides “pharmaka (drugs) for human ills” [frs. III, 112]), Pythagoras (who seems to have participated in medical research), and Democritus (who “first really developed the [medical] analogy at length in a clearly philosophical context”). “Throughout antiquity,” says Frede, “the relation between philosophy and medicine was very close.” Burnet writes that “it is impossible to understand the history of philosophy ... without keeping the history of medicine constantly in view.” Another scholar uses the terms “’medical’ argument” and “medical philosophy” in connection with the Hellenistic schools.
“The idea that philosophers ... are like doctors,” she writes, “and can cure diseases of the soul, is a Hellenistic commonplace.” The Greek Skeptics regarded themselves as doctors who “wish to cure by argument (logos) the opinions of the dogmatists” (Sextus, OP III.280281). They choose different arguments for different opinions, as medical doctors “have remedies which differ” for different cases (ibid.). Epicurus also presented himself as a physician showing the way to eliminate suffering: Just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel disease from the body, so there is no profit in philosophy if it does not expel disease from the mind. (Sent. Vat. LIV) Vain is the word of a philosopher which heals not the suffering of man. (Ap. Porph. Ad Marc. 31; Us. 221) The connection is more than a metaphor. Empedocles was a medical doctor, Pythagoras and Democritus were both experts in the medicine of their day. “At first,” Celsus wrote, “the science of healing was supposed to be part of philosophy” (Prooem. 6). These “deep” “connections between medicine and philosophy”s were persistent. At a later date, two examples of philosopher-physicians were Sextus Empiricus and Galen, both of whom wrote philosophical as well as medical treatises—not to mention Alcmaeon of Croton (fl. 480), Diocles of Carystus (c. 350), Erasistratus (c. 260), Herophilus (c. 260), Heraclides of Tarentum (c. 100), Thessalus of Trales (c. 50 a.D.), Theodas and Medodotus (boths c. 150 A.D.), all of whom wrote works, no longer extant, on both medicine and philosophy. As Aristotle said, “the most refined philosophers of nature end up by discussing the principles of medicine” (De Resp. 480b28-30). The idea that philosophy is medicine for a sick soul persists through the Roman Empire (Dio Chrysostom, a Cynic teacher of the second century A.D., described himself as a doctor “who cures mental ill-health”) and may be seen as extending all the way forward to the era of, say, Cornelius Agrippa and Montaigne.
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