Prognosis and Diagnosis: A Comparison of Ancient and Modern Medicine

Out of the great variety of concepts developed on the borderline between Greek philosophy and biology I shall choose one that seems of fundamental importance, namely "Physis." Once we have made clear the meaning which the Greeks attached to this word, we can infer some historical and sociological reasons for the characteristic developments of Greek medicine and its specific ideology, and contrast its methods with those of modern medicine of the XVIth and XVIIth centuries. All biological theories enunciated by the philosophers of ancient Greece are solutions to one problem, that of the relation between the One and the Many. What unity is concealed by the multiplicity of phenomena? This unity is nature, and all philosophers before Socrates speculated "On Nature." Thus, the Greek philosopher showed his yearning for enlightenment and science. He differed from his predecessor the theologian, who among other more primitive nations had been in charge of medicine, that is to say, of the practical application of the knowledge of nature. Mystical intuitions such as the identity of man and the world were, as Cawadias says, "rationalized" by the Greeks and converted into the doctrine of the elements, air, water, earth and fire, which build up the human body and the world, the microcosm and the macrocosm.' Convinced of one fundamental principle behind all phenomena, the Greek rejects the idea of a multiplicity of agents, such as gods and daemons, governing nature according to their own independent decisions. The basic principle in nature, which the Greek philosopher seeks, acts according to causal necessity. There is no better illustration of these scientific tendencies of the Greek "Physiologoi" than the Hippocratic treatise on the holy disease, epilepsy. The author says that this disease has been attributed to divine influences because men were so amazed at its peculiar symptoms that they had nothing to offer in the way of natural explanation; that referring natural phenomena to gods and daemons is but concealing one's own ignorance behind dishonest pseudo-knowledge; and that he wishes to show that epilepsy is as natural a disease as any other. This seems so much the more important as the therapy of a disease entirely depends