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During the fifth and fourth centuries bce, a number of Greek doctors attempted to base the art of healing on the first principles of all things in general. These “cosmological doctors” included such thinkers as Eryximachus, Philistion, Petron, the unnamed opponents of On Ancient Medicine, and the authors of On the Nature of the Human Being, On Breaths, On Flesh, and On Regimen. Previous studies have approached these thinkers under the rubric of medicine's interactions with “philosophy.” This book, by contrast, will approach them from a medical point of view, arguing that the best way to understand these systems is to view them as responses to preexisting modes of medical thinking.

Why did some doctors in Classical Greece feel compelled to study the universe as a whole? How could cosmological principles be employed in clinical practice? This book explores the works of the cosmological doctors, such as On Breaths, On Flesh, and On Regimen, and argues that they form part of a much broader reorganization of medical knowledge in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. These healers used cosmological principles as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, more traditional approaches to health and disease, creating theories about the cosmos whose obscurities can best be understood as the products of medical thinking. Through fresh readings of many ancient sources, the book revises customary views of the intersections between medicine and cosmology in Classical Greece and advances our understanding of one of the most remarkable periods in the history of ancient thought.

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Introduction

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The Cosmological Doctors of Classical Greece

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Introduction

Summary

The Cosmological Doctors of Classical Greece