Universal knowledge theory
Divinae manus
Definition: Means “divine hands.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme:
Shows that the use of drugs has been perfected through testing and produce results that are like a divine influence. Shows that drugs are magical things that can treat you and it departs from early Hippocratic medicine.
Gloria
Definition: Means “fame.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes that other men have not attained considerable honor. He shows that your honor or fame builds up your reputation as a doctor. Practice medicine that right way.
Humanitas
Definition: Means “humane quality” or “human kindness.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes “All gods and men should hate the doctor whose heart lacks compassion and the spirit of human kindness.” This shows what qualities he believed doctors should have. He relates this to The Oath. Treat all regardless of nationality. This is a distinctly Roman addition to medicine.
Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-90 CE)
Definition: Roman army physician.
Location in texts: Dioscorides On Medicinal Substances
Significance/theme: Dioscorides is more comprehensive than many of his precursors. Dioscorides attempts a comprehensive compilation of plants, animals, and other medical substances. He travelled around a lot and saw many different herbs, a pharmacist in a sense. He relates to the idea of a valetudinaria, or military hospital. Dioscorides was a good source of information because he knew the plants really well.
Methodism
Definition: A dominant medical theory or sect throughout the Roman world for at least three centuries. Methodism has its name because of its claim to follow a uniquely successful method of healing. Founded by Themison.
Location in texts: Celsus, Themison, Thessalus, and Soranus
Significance/theme: Methodism operates on general principles of disease instead of either pure empirical observation or broader theories of the body. These general principles of disease are constriction, looseness, or some combination of the two. Methodism seems to have more of an ad hoc, or pragmatic, feel from the practice of diatritos. Methodists seem to have employed a corpuscular or atomistic theory.
Communia morborum
Definition: Means “general principles of disease” or “commonalities of disease.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This is the general principle of Methodism. Practitioners believe that it is sufficient to observe certain general characteristics of diseases. There are three classes of characteristics: constriction, looseness, and mixture.
Constriction (“genus adstrictum”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Looseness (“genus fluens”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Soranus of Ephesus (c. 98-138 CE)
Definition: Major figure in Methodism and he is famous for his surviving gynecology. Was the son of a doctor.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology, On Fractures, On Bandages
Significance/theme: Soranus provides us with the most extensive surviving Gynecology from antiquity. He is one of the first to say that virginity is OK, that pregnancy/sex isn’t necessarily the optimal state of health for women. We see a looseness disease, gonorroia, from him. Some parts offer clear cultural stereotypes and biases.
Gonorroia (‘flowing from the genitals’)
Definition: Describes semen.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gonorroia
Significance/theme: The disease is usually chronic and belongs to the “lax” (roôdes) kind.
Hysterikê pnix
Definition: Means “strangulation of the womb.”
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: The disease is of the constricted and violent class and exists both in an acute and chronic form. He writes about what to do in the case of hysterical suffocation.
Sextus Empiricus (c. 160-210 CE)
Definition: A physician and philosopher.
Location in texts: Sextus’ Pyrrhonism
Significance/theme: Sextus Empiricus links Skepticism to Methodism. He is also known for the ten modes of Pyrrhonism. He described how Methodists thinking about medicine is similar to skepticism. He means this idea that Methodists don’t assent to there being hidden causes. They will treat a patient on the fact that these symptoms seem to be there, and this seems to work, but don’t necessarily believe in hidden causes or why they work. Sextus is an example of interweaving of medicine and philosophy in antiquity.
Diatritos
Definition: Means “third day” or every 48 hours. It’s the re-examination every 48 hours.
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: It is a principle of Methodism. It highlights the ad hoc nature of Methodism. It is mocked by Pliny, who believes it’s a money grab.
Metasynkrisis (‘mixing’)
Definition: The modification of pores of the body
Location in texts: Thessalus
Significance/theme: It was a therapy for chronic (rather than acute) diseases. It states how the body is mixed together is important, and changing that to make more lose or more restricted is part of what you do as a doctor
Satyriasis
Definition: “insatiable sexual desire”; like a Satyr
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: It comes out of their methodology and culture and we see a lot of errors they make are connected to cultural presumptions.
Kata phusin
Definition: Means “according to nature.”
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: First two of Soranus’ books are about this. Books 1 and 2 deal with best midwife, abortion, labor, delivery, cutting umbilical cord, and feeding newborn.
Para phusin
Definition: Means “against nature” or abnormal.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: Last two of Soranus’ books are about this. Book 3 and 4 deal with painful menstruation, the inflammation, hemorrhage, and paralysis of uterus, difficult labor, and retention of placenta.
Humoral Alternatives
Pneumatists (believe in pneuma, ‘breath’)
Definition: They believe in pneuma, or breath, that holds the world together. Hot and cold and wet and dry (active and passive principles).
Location in texts: Athenaeus of Attaleia, Claudius Agathinus, Achigenes of Apamea
Significance/theme: Stood in opposition of Methodist.
Athenaeus of Attaleia (60 BCE? Early Empire?)
Definition: Physician and key pneumatist.
Location in texts: Galen, Pneuma, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists
Significance/theme: Founder of the Pneumatic school of medicine. Just as the living body has a pneuma, so the world has one, too. Athenaeus explores parallels between the world and the body.
Claudius Agathinus (1st c. CE)
Definition: Key pneumist.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: Wrote on pulsation and fevers. The surviving evidence suggests a significant interest in bathing, particularly cold baths. Cold baths improve complexions, toned the body, and sharpened senses. Warm baths make one flabby, weak, and pale. Particularly good is a cold bath combined with exercise.
Rufus of Ephesus (50-100 CE?)
Definition: Greek Hippocratic doctor that likely studied in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Rufus’ On Gout, On Diseases of the Bladder and Kidneys, On Satyriasis and Gonorrhea, and On Melancholy
Significance/theme: He committed to the four humors, and also the idea that we are not all naturally the same. His works seem to steer clear of the theoretical (which makes sense if he genuinely believes in the radically individual nature of each person). When looking at theories that compete with Methodism we see that Rufus clearly draws upon the legacy of the four humors. Rufus of Ephesus’s work On Melancholy shows an extended treatment of a disease that largely falls into the explanatory patterns we found in works such as Airs, Waters, Places and The Nature of Man
Core of all these alternatives seem to be connected to a re-interpretation of Hippocratic medicine.
Galen
Nicon
Definition: Galen’s father.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Order of My Own Books
Significance/theme: Nicon, in 146 CE, turns Galen to medicine. He dies in 148/9 CE and Galen then travels to Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria for study. Galen writes, “; in my seventeenth he was persuaded by clear dreams to make me study medicine at the same time as philosophy.” Galen wants to resemble the virtuous life of his father. He received a vision in the Asclepeion that his son would be a physician.
Glaucon
Definition: Philosopher and friend of Galen.
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Glaucon is keen to test whether Galen can really perform correct diagnoses and prognoses.
Pergamum
Definition: Galen’s hometown.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: In 143 CE Galen begins to attend philosophy lectures in Pergamum. In 157 CE Galen was given public appointment as physician to the gladiators in Pergamum. At Pergamum was a library and an Asclepeion (healing temple).
Rete mirabile
Definition: Means “wondrous net.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Utility of the Parts
Significance/theme: Galen uses this to describe the arteries. He says it is a marvelous network and since it was placed by Nature indicates some great use. Galen thinks this is at the base of the brain and gets it from dissecting a sheep. He was not right about everything; this was a public dissection on animals not humans.
Archê
Definition: Means “source.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Doctrines
Significance/theme: This shows how Galen’s knowledge was based on careful observation. There are three systems; one flows from the brain (muscles), a second from the heart (pulse), and a third from the liver (nutrition). The “proof’ of these systems lies in dissection that shows “flow” from a “source.”
Dunamis
Definition: Means “power” or “potential.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Powers of Simple Drugs
Significance/theme: Galen says that “Everything that has some power (dunamis) to alter our nature we call pharmakon, in the same way, I believe, as we also call everything that has some power to increase its substance a foodstuff, and both of these terms are relative in regard to quantity…A dunamis is some active cause, whether in actuality or in prospect.”
Diairesis
Definition: Means “division.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics place heavy emphasis on logical division. It describes the broad analytical process that the physician uses to determine the appropriate treatment for his patient. For example, it may be used to describe the realization that a given symptom or ‘indication’ (endeixis) allows a doctor to know that the disease should be treated with (e.G.) barley gruel rather than another remedy. It is related to the term diorismos, or specification.
Diorismos
Definition: Means “specification” or “clarification.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics has emphasis on this. It similarly considers factors relevant to remedies such as age, gender, and size, and it demonstrates one of the ways in which philosophy was significant for Galen’s medical practice. Galen writes, “Specification then allows the doctor to refine and adjust a general rule to see the extent to which it applies in specific cases.”
Endeixis
Definition: Means “indicator” or “symptom.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Part of Galen therapeutics and in order to avoid confusion you follow the indications of the body. They allow a knowledgeable doctor to make the appropriate categorizations and diagnoses.
Duskrasiai
Definition: Means “imbalances” or “bad mixture.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen says diseases are generally caused by things like imbalances. This shows that he is very similar to a Hippocratic doctor.
Thinning diet (NOT for weight loss…; thinning of humors)
Definition: A method of fixing health.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Thinning Diet
Significance/theme: The Thinning Diet gives us a glimpse into the world of Galen’s dietetics. This treatise seems largely informed by ideas of ‘balance’ and appropriate ‘mixing’ in the humors. It generally recommends strong, pungent foods as ‘thinning.’ This shows the ideas of balance, humor theory, and Hippocratic ideas.
Galen
Significance/theme: We have tons of material from Galen. His “life story” tells us much about his medical practice. His education molded him as a “philosophical” doctor.His experience as a “gladiator” physician gave him ample experience with anatomy and surgery. His experience in Rome demonstrates what a showman he was. He clearly was not afraid to perform and “puff himself up.” He cemented himself as the Hippocratic physician. His teleology shines through in his understanding of anatomy. Galen’s use of drugs is informed by philosophical principles borrowed from Aristotle. Galen was a careful observer. His theory, like all, had strong component in diet and exercise.
The Exercise with the Small Ball
Significance/theme: Gives us insight into Galen’s chief concerns in exercise. He is concerned that exercise involves both the body and the mind; and thinks that the best exercise involves the entire body (arms, legs, etc.) in various ways (vigorous, relaxed, etc.). Variety and balance are good.
Roman Medical Culture
Apuleius of Madauros (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: Roman prose writer.
Location in texts: Apuleius’ Florida and Apology
Significance/theme: Apuleius, in his Apology, shows an extensive knowledge of medicine and philosophy. It shows non-doctors as doctors. He was a sophist and shows that even people who are not doctors do read some technical theories about medicine.
Aidôs
Definition: Means “modesty.”
Location in texts: Galen texts
Significance/theme: Shows how a doctor’s reputation is built. The doctor places great value on the public not observing the patients’ rear or genital region. Makes you trust a doctor in public and private.
Plutarch (c. 46-120 CE)
Definition: Greek historian, biographer, and essayist.
Location in texts: Plutarch’s Lives and How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend)
Significance/theme: Authors such as Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, and Seneca all possess surprisingly extensive medical knowledge. Plutarch attacks the idea of Galen practicing in public.
Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 325-391 CE)
Definition: Roman soldier and historian.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: He shows the legislative efforts to control medicine. He gives us info that at times it seems like you could be put to death for having certain medical magical objects. He shows there are legal restrictions on what medicine can do.
Aelius Aristides (117-181 CE)
Definition: A medical sophist.
Location in texts: Aristides’ Sacred Tales
Significance/theme: He suffered from numerous aliments that he claimed were healed by Asclepius. Although Aristides’ account may be rhetorically embellished, it gives us a clear statement of a personal relationship with Asclepius and some of the ‘cures’ that were undertaken in the name of the god. He tells us that ancient medicine in the second century still existed in parallel to religious medicine, basically has dreams about Asclepius, and pursues a medical regimen that is VERY counter to what Galen would prescribe or suggest (much less scientific).
Augustine of Hippo (345-430 CE)
Definition: Theologian and philosopher in Rome.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: Sets the scene of the parameters of religion at Rome. He gives us evidence about Roman religion and how the Romans had a god for almost everything.
Roman Religion
Cloacina
Definition: Roman goddess of sewers
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
Flora
Definition: Roman goddess of flowers.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
M. Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE)
Definition: Ancient Roman scholar and writer.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God, Varro’s Nine Books of Disciplines
Significance/theme: His Nine Books of Disciplines became a model for later encyclopedists, especially Pliny the Elder. Varro decided to focus on identifying nine of these arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture. Using Varro’s list, subsequent writers defined the seven classical “liberal arts of the medieval schools”
Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: A rhetorician and satirist who wrote in Greek language.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: He is skeptic of Asclepius cult. Not all in the Roman world trusted anything associated with Asclepius: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. There are people who are skeptical of Asclepius and people that take advantage of the gullible.
Alexander of Abonoteichus
Definition: A false prophet who hatches a baby snake from a goose egg.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. Shows there are people who take advantage of those that are gullible and believe in Asclepius cult.
Plato
Plato
Definition: Philosopher in Greece.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus, and Phaedrus
Significance/theme: Shows philosophical medicine. Student of his was Aristotle.
Teleology (the study of ends)
Definition: Means “the study of ends.” There is an end, or goal, that humans are created towards. Things are made in order to do something.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: It is a study that underwrites many of the biological explanations of both Plato and Aristotle. These are explanations that border on the religious, but they can be articulated v. Differently and indeed scientifically. Such explanations have far-reaching consequences for all aspects of medicine and biology. Disease is the reverse of nature and how things should go.
Dêmiourgos
Definition: A demiurge, or being that is responsible for the creation of the universe.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: In Timaeus Plato says that the world is crafter by a demiurge, or craftsman, who gives order to the world by looking at the external, unchanging “forms.”
Cholê
Definition: Means “bile.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Plato’s mentioning of bile means he was likely exposes to the ideas of humors.
Phaedo
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a dialogue with Socrates.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: This work shows the idea of teleology. It doesn’t just explain why they are how they are but why they are the best.
Nous
Definition: Means mind
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that it is the mind (nous) that arranges and causes all things and he was pleased with this theory of cause, and it seemed to him to be somehow right that the mind should be the cause of all things.
Beltiston
Definition: Means “what is best.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that the mind arranges everything and establishes each thing as it is best for it to be.
Timaeus
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a rhetorical display rather than a typical “dialogue.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Timaeus gives an account of the origins of the physical world and says it is crafted by dêmiourgos. Timaeus develops a theory of the ‘receptacle’ (hypodochê), a featureless material onto which the craftsman places ‘Formal’ constraints. It is a creation story like we find in Empedocles. The lengthy speech delivered by Timaeus ultimately addresses the topic of diseases of the body and the soul and their remedies. Timaeus’ theories about the origins of disease sound not wholly unlike explanations found in the Hippocratic corpus. Plato’s Timaeus offers an account of disease that bears many similarities to Hippocratic accounts as well as to Empedocles’ ‘four roots’ theory of the world (or even to Philistion in the Anonymus Londinensis).
Aristotle
Aristotle
Definition: Aristotle was a philosopher, scientist, and student of Plato. His father was a doctor.
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Problems, History of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, On the Generation of Animals
Significance/theme: Methodologically, he is much closer to modern, empiricalscience. He has an extensive interest in biology of all sorts. He operates on classification (based on observation and assumption). In his biological works, goes into great detail about differences between various different types of animals and even different genders of animals. His focus is on classification and separation of the different types of animals, but this focus can give us interesting medical information. He was an early inspiration for Galen’s idea that you need to be both empiricist and rationalists to be successful. He also studies animals.
Aitiai
Definition: Means “causes.”
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Parts of Animals
Significance/theme: Aristotle is interested in substances and what they cause. His explanation of disease is like “what is the ultimate cause of ‘x’?”
Ousia
Definition: Means “substance.”
Location in texts: Aristotle
Significance/theme: Aristotle was interested in substance and what it causes. For example, what makes a certain animal what it is?
Herophilus
Herophilus (325-255 BCE)
Definition: Herophilus was a Greek physician who practiced in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Herophilus’ Anatomy, On Eyes, On Pulses, Therapeutics
Significance/theme: He is the first anatomist and father of anatomy. He systematically performed many dissections. He was a trans-figure, both rationalist and empiricist. Herophilus was not afraid of breaking previous views. He found a lot of knowledge about the human body. Big contributions include: pulse, veins, eye, and nerves.
Hagnodice
Definition: Herophilus taught her.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: She desired to learn medicine. So she pretended to be a male. Women didn’t trust “him” but then she revealed she was a woman. This showed a culture shift for women, a different world for medical knowledge.
Arachnoeides
Definition: Means “cobweb-like.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was used describing the anatomy of the eye. It shows the extremely detailed dissections that Herophilus would do.
Sphygmos
Definition: Means “pulse.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Shows an impressive level of detail about Herophilus’ works.
Thesis
Definition: Means “down-beat.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Herophilus uses this describing pulse. He says that the dilation of the artery is analogous to the down-beat. Compared it to how musicians have up-beat and down-beat.
Rationalist (dogmatist)
Definition: Herophilus was a rationalist and first established the school.
Location in texts: In Celsus’ Preface
Significance/theme: They believe in a theory of the body, like the four humors, as opposed to empirical school where they observe and give advice based on observation (experience). Galen believes in some hidden cause theory. You can’t literally see the four humors. They attribute the ultimate cause of disease to hidden things.
Divinae manus
Definition: Means “divine hands.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Shows that the use of drugs has been perfected through testing and produce results that are like a divine influence. Shows that drugs are magical things that can treat you and it departs from early Hippocratic medicine.
Gloria
Definition: Means “fame.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes that other men have not attained considerable honor. He shows that your honor or fame builds up your reputation as a doctor. Practice medicine that right way.
Humanitas
Definition: Means “humane quality” or “human kindness.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes “All gods and men should hate the doctor whose heart lacks compassion and the spirit of human kindness.” This shows what qualities he believed doctors should have. He relates this to The Oath. Treat all regardless of nationality. This is a distinctly Roman addition to medicine.
Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-90 CE)
Definition: Roman army physician.
Location in texts: Dioscorides On Medicinal Substances
Significance/theme: Dioscorides is more comprehensive than many of his precursors. Dioscorides attempts a comprehensive compilation of plants, animals, and other medical substances. He travelled around a lot and saw many different herbs, a pharmacist in a sense. He relates to the idea of a valetudinaria, or military hospital. Dioscorides was a good source of information because he knew the plants really well.
Methodism
Methodism
Definition: A dominant medical theory or sect throughout the Roman world for at least three centuries. Methodism has its name because of its claim to follow a uniquely successful method of healing. Founded by Themison.
Location in texts: Celsus, Themison, Thessalus, and Soranus
Significance/theme: Methodism operates on general principles of disease instead of either pure empirical observation or broader theories of the body. These general principles of disease are constriction, looseness, or some combination of the two. Methodism seems to have more of an ad hoc, or pragmatic, feel from the practice of diatritos. Methodists seem to have employed a corpuscular or atomistic theory.
Communia morborum
Definition: Means “general principles of disease” or “commonalities of disease.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This is the general principle of Methodism. Practitioners believe that it is sufficient to observe certain general characteristics of diseases. There are three classes of characteristics: constriction, looseness, and mixture.
Constriction (“genus adstrictum”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Looseness (“genus fluens”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Soranus of Ephesus (c. 98-138 CE)
Definition: Major figure in Methodism and he is famous for his surviving gynecology. Was the son of a doctor.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology, On Fractures, On Bandages
Significance/theme: Soranus provides us with the most extensive surviving Gynecology from antiquity. He is one of the first to say that virginity is OK, that pregnancy/sex isn’t necessarily the optimal state of health for women. We see a looseness disease, gonorroia, from him. Some parts offer clear cultural stereotypes and biases.
Gonorroia (‘flowing from the genitals’)
Definition: Describes semen.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gonorroia
Significance/theme: The disease is usually chronic and belongs to the “lax” (roôdes) kind.
Hysterikê pnix
Definition: Means “strangulation of the womb.”
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: The disease is of the constricted and violent class and exists both in an acute and chronic form. He writes about what to do in the case of hysterical suffocation.
Sextus Empiricus (c. 160-210 CE)
Definition: A physician and philosopher.
Location in texts: Sextus’ Pyrrhonism
Significance/theme: Sextus Empiricus links Skepticism to Methodism. He is also known for the ten modes of Pyrrhonism. He described how Methodists thinking about medicine is similar to skepticism. He means this idea that Methodists don’t assent to there being hidden causes. They will treat a patient on the fact that these symptoms seem to be there, and this seems to work, but don’t necessarily believe in hidden causes or why they work. Sextus is an example of interweaving of medicine and philosophy in antiquity.
Diatritos
Definition: Means “third day” or every 48 hours. It’s the re-examination every 48 hours.
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: It is a principle of Methodism. It highlights the ad hoc nature of Methodism. It is mocked by Pliny, who believes it’s a money grab.
Metasynkrisis (‘mixing’)
Definition: The modification of pores of the body
Location in texts: Thessalus
Significance/theme: It was a therapy for chronic (rather than acute) diseases. It states how the body is mixed together is important, and changing that to make more lose or more restricted is part of what you do as a doctor
Satyriasis
Definition: “insatiable sexual desire”; like a Satyr
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: It comes out of their methodology and culture and we see a lot of errors they make are connected to cultural presumptions.
Kata phusin
Definition: Means “according to nature.”
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: First two of Soranus’ books are about this. Books 1 and 2 deal with best midwife, abortion, labor, delivery, cutting umbilical cord, and feeding newborn.
Para phusin
Definition: Means “against nature” or abnormal.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: Last two of Soranus’ books are about this. Book 3 and 4 deal with painful menstruation, the inflammation, hemorrhage, and paralysis of uterus, difficult labor, and retention of placenta.
Humoral Alternatives
Pneumatists (believe in pneuma, ‘breath’)
Definition: They believe in pneuma, or breath, that holds the world together. Hot and cold and wet and dry (active and passive principles).
Location in texts: Athenaeus of Attaleia, Claudius Agathinus, Achigenes of Apamea
Significance/theme: Stood in opposition of Methodist.
Athenaeus of Attaleia (60 BCE? Early Empire?)
Definition: Physician and key pneumatist.
Location in texts: Galen, Pneuma, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists
Significance/theme: Founder of the Pneumatic school of medicine. Just as the living body has a pneuma, so the world has one, too. Athenaeus explores parallels between the world and the body.
Claudius Agathinus (1st c. CE)
Definition: Key pneumist.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: Wrote on pulsation and fevers. The surviving evidence suggests a significant interest in bathing, particularly cold baths. Cold baths improve complexions, toned the body, and sharpened senses. Warm baths make one flabby, weak, and pale. Particularly good is a cold bath combined with exercise.
Rufus of Ephesus (50-100 CE?)
Definition: Greek Hippocratic doctor that likely studied in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Rufus’ On Gout, On Diseases of the Bladder and Kidneys, On Satyriasis and Gonorrhea, and On Melancholy
Significance/theme: He committed to the four humors, and also the idea that we are not all naturally the same. His works seem to steer clear of the theoretical (which makes sense if he genuinely believes in the radically individual nature of each person). When looking at theories that compete with Methodism we see that Rufus clearly draws upon the legacy of the four humors. Rufus of Ephesus’s work On Melancholy shows an extended treatment of a disease that largely falls into the explanatory patterns we found in works such as Airs, Waters, Places and The Nature of Man
Core of all these alternatives seem to be connected to a re-interpretation of Hippocratic medicine.
Galen
Nicon
Definition: Galen’s father.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Order of My Own Books
Significance/theme: Nicon, in 146 CE, turns Galen to medicine. He dies in 148/9 CE and Galen then travels to Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria for study. Galen writes, “; in my seventeenth he was persuaded by clear dreams to make me study medicine at the same time as philosophy.” Galen wants to resemble the virtuous life of his father. He received a vision in the Asclepeion that his son would be a physician.
Glaucon
Definition: Philosopher and friend of Galen.
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Glaucon is keen to test whether Galen can really perform correct diagnoses and prognoses.
Pergamum
Definition: Galen’s hometown.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: In 143 CE Galen begins to attend philosophy lectures in Pergamum. In 157 CE Galen was given public appointment as physician to the gladiators in Pergamum. At Pergamum was a library and an Asclepeion (healing temple).
Rete mirabile
Definition: Means “wondrous net.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Utility of the Parts
Significance/theme: Galen uses this to describe the arteries. He says it is a marvelous network and since it was placed by Nature indicates some great use. Galen thinks this is at the base of the brain and gets it from dissecting a sheep. He was not right about everything; this was a public dissection on animals not humans.
Archê
Definition: Means “source.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Doctrines
Significance/theme: This shows how Galen’s knowledge was based on careful observation. There are three systems; one flows from the brain (muscles), a second from the heart (pulse), and a third from the liver (nutrition). The “proof’ of these systems lies in dissection that shows “flow” from a “source.”
Dunamis
Definition: Means “power” or “potential.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Powers of Simple Drugs
Significance/theme: Galen says that “Everything that has some power (dunamis) to alter our nature we call pharmakon, in the same way, I believe, as we also call everything that has some power to increase its substance a foodstuff, and both of these terms are relative in regard to quantity…A dunamis is some active cause, whether in actuality or in prospect.”
Diairesis
Definition: Means “division.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics place heavy emphasis on logical division. It describes the broad analytical process that the physician uses to determine the appropriate treatment for his patient. For example, it may be used to describe the realization that a given symptom or ‘indication’ (endeixis) allows a doctor to know that the disease should be treated with (e.G.) barley gruel rather than another remedy. It is related to the term diorismos, or specification.
Diorismos
Definition: Means “specification” or “clarification.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics has emphasis on this. It similarly considers factors relevant to remedies such as age, gender, and size, and it demonstrates one of the ways in which philosophy was significant for Galen’s medical practice. Galen writes, “Specification then allows the doctor to refine and adjust a general rule to see the extent to which it applies in specific cases.”
Endeixis
Definition: Means “indicator” or “symptom.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Part of Galen therapeutics and in order to avoid confusion you follow the indications of the body. They allow a knowledgeable doctor to make the appropriate categorizations and diagnoses.
Duskrasiai
Definition: Means “imbalances” or “bad mixture.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen says diseases are generally caused by things like imbalances. This shows that he is very similar to a Hippocratic doctor.
Thinning diet (NOT for weight loss…; thinning of humors)
Definition: A method of fixing health.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Thinning Diet
Significance/theme: The Thinning Diet gives us a glimpse into the world of Galen’s dietetics. This treatise seems largely informed by ideas of ‘balance’ and appropriate ‘mixing’ in the humors. It generally recommends strong, pungent foods as ‘thinning.’ This shows the ideas of balance, humor theory, and Hippocratic ideas.
Galen
Significance/theme: We have tons of material from Galen. His “life story” tells us much about his medical practice. His education molded him as a “philosophical” doctor.His experience as a “gladiator” physician gave him ample experience with anatomy and surgery. His experience in Rome demonstrates what a showman he was. He clearly was not afraid to perform and “puff himself up.” He cemented himself as the Hippocratic physician. His teleology shines through in his understanding of anatomy. Galen’s use of drugs is informed by philosophical principles borrowed from Aristotle. Galen was a careful observer. His theory, like all, had strong component in diet and exercise.
The Exercise with the Small Ball
Significance/theme: Gives us insight into Galen’s chief concerns in exercise. He is concerned that exercise involves both the body and the mind; and thinks that the best exercise involves the entire body (arms, legs, etc.) in various ways (vigorous, relaxed, etc.). Variety and balance are good.
Roman Medical Culture
Apuleius of Madauros (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: Roman prose writer.
Location in texts: Apuleius’ Florida and Apology
Significance/theme: Apuleius, in his Apology, shows an extensive knowledge of medicine and philosophy. It shows non-doctors as doctors. He was a sophist and shows that even people who are not doctors do read some technical theories about medicine.
Aidôs
Definition: Means “modesty.”
Location in texts: Galen texts
Significance/theme: Shows how a doctor’s reputation is built. The doctor places great value on the public not observing the patients’ rear or genital region. Makes you trust a doctor in public and private.
Plutarch (c. 46-120 CE)
Definition: Greek historian, biographer, and essayist.
Location in texts: Plutarch’s Lives and How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend)
Significance/theme: Authors such as Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, and Seneca all possess surprisingly extensive medical knowledge. Plutarch attacks the idea of Galen practicing in public.
Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 325-391 CE)
Definition: Roman soldier and historian.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: He shows the legislative efforts to control medicine. He gives us info that at times it seems like you could be put to death for having certain medical magical objects. He shows there are legal restrictions on what medicine can do.
Aelius Aristides (117-181 CE)
Definition: A medical sophist.
Location in texts: Aristides’ Sacred Tales
Significance/theme: He suffered from numerous aliments that he claimed were healed by Asclepius. Although Aristides’ account may be rhetorically embellished, it gives us a clear statement of a personal relationship with Asclepius and some of the ‘cures’ that were undertaken in the name of the god. He tells us that ancient medicine in the second century still existed in parallel to religious medicine, basically has dreams about Asclepius, and pursues a medical regimen that is VERY counter to what Galen would prescribe or suggest (much less scientific).
Augustine of Hippo (345-430 CE)
Definition: Theologian and philosopher in Rome.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: Sets the scene of the parameters of religion at Rome. He gives us evidence about Roman religion and how the Romans had a god for almost everything.
Roman Religion
Cloacina
Definition: Roman goddess of sewers
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
Flora
Definition: Roman goddess of flowers.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
M. Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE)
Definition: Ancient Roman scholar and writer.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God, Varro’s Nine Books of Disciplines
Significance/theme: His Nine Books of Disciplines became a model for later encyclopedists, especially Pliny the Elder. Varro decided to focus on identifying nine of these arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture. Using Varro’s list, subsequent writers defined the seven classical “liberal arts of the medieval schools”
Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: A rhetorician and satirist who wrote in Greek language.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: He is skeptic of Asclepius cult. Not all in the Roman world trusted anything associated with Asclepius: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. There are people who are skeptical of Asclepius and people that take advantage of the gullible.
Alexander of Abonoteichus
Definition: A false prophet who hatches a baby snake from a goose egg.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. Shows there are people who take advantage of those that are gullible and believe in Asclepius cult.
Plato
Plato
Definition: Philosopher in Greece.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus, and Phaedrus
Significance/theme: Shows philosophical medicine. Student of his was Aristotle.
Teleology (the study of ends)
Definition: Means “the study of ends.” There is an end, or goal, that humans are created towards. Things are made in order to do something.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: It is a study that underwrites many of the biological explanations of both Plato and Aristotle. These are explanations that border on the religious, but they can be articulated v. Differently and indeed scientifically. Such explanations have far-reaching consequences for all aspects of medicine and biology. Disease is the reverse of nature and how things should go.
Dêmiourgos
Definition: A demiurge, or being that is responsible for the creation of the universe.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: In Timaeus Plato says that the world is crafter by a demiurge, or craftsman, who gives order to the world by looking at the external, unchanging “forms.”
Cholê
Definition: Means “bile.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Plato’s mentioning of bile means he was likely exposes to the ideas of humors.
Phaedo
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a dialogue with Socrates.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: This work shows the idea of teleology. It doesn’t just explain why they are how they are but why they are the best.
Nous
Definition: Means mind
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that it is the mind (nous) that arranges and causes all things and he was pleased with this theory of cause, and it seemed to him to be somehow right that the mind should be the cause of all things.
Beltiston
Definition: Means “what is best.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that the mind arranges everything and establishes each thing as it is best for it to be.
Timaeus
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a rhetorical display rather than a typical “dialogue.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Timaeus gives an account of the origins of the physical world and says it is crafted by dêmiourgos. Timaeus develops a theory of the ‘receptacle’ (hypodochê), a featureless material onto which the craftsman places ‘Formal’ constraints. It is a creation story like we find in Empedocles. The lengthy speech delivered by Timaeus ultimately addresses the topic of diseases of the body and the soul and their remedies. Timaeus’ theories about the origins of disease sound not wholly unlike explanations found in the Hippocratic corpus. Plato’s Timaeus offers an account of disease that bears many similarities to Hippocratic accounts as well as to Empedocles’ ‘four roots’ theory of the world (or even to Philistion in the Anonymus Londinensis).
Aristotle
Aristotle
Definition: Aristotle was a philosopher, scientist, and student of Plato. His father was a doctor.
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Problems, History of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, On the Generation of Animals
Significance/theme: Methodologically, he is much closer to modern, empiricalscience. He has an extensive interest in biology of all sorts. He operates on classification (based on observation and assumption). In his biological works, goes into great detail about differences between various different types of animals and even different genders of animals. His focus is on classification and separation of the different types of animals, but this focus can give us interesting medical information. He was an early inspiration for Galen’s idea that you need to be both empiricist and rationalists to be successful. He also studies animals.
Aitiai
Definition: Means “causes.”
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Parts of Animals
Significance/theme: Aristotle is interested in substances and what they cause. His explanation of disease is like “what is the ultimate cause of ‘x’?”
Ousia
Definition: Means “substance.”
Location in texts: Aristotle
Significance/theme: Aristotle was interested in substance and what it causes. For example, what makes a certain animal what it is?
Herophilus
Herophilus (325-255 BCE)
Definition: Herophilus was a Greek physician who practiced in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Herophilus’ Anatomy, On Eyes, On Pulses, Therapeutics
Significance/theme: He is the first anatomist and father of anatomy. He systematically performed many dissections. He was a trans-figure, both rationalist and empiricist. Herophilus was not afraid of breaking previous views. He found a lot of knowledge about the human body. Big contributions include: pulse, veins, eye, and nerves.
Hagnodice
Definition: Herophilus taught her.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: She desired to learn medicine. So she pretended to be a male. Women didn’t trust “him” but then she revealed she was a woman. This showed a culture shift for women, a different world for medical knowledge.
Arachnoeides
Definition: Means “cobweb-like.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was used describing the anatomy of the eye. It shows the extremely detailed dissections that Herophilus would do.
Sphygmos
Definition: Means “pulse.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Shows an impressive level of detail about Herophilus’ works.
Thesis
Definition: Means “down-beat.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Herophilus uses this describing pulse. He says that the dilation of the artery is analogous to the down-beat. Compared it to how musicians have up-beat and down-beat.
Rationalist (dogmatist)
Definition: Herophilus was a rationalist and first established the school.
Location in texts: In Celsus’ Preface
Significance/theme: They believe in a theory of the body, like the four humors, as opposed to empirical school where they observe and give advice based on observation (experience). Galen believes in some hidden cause theory. You can’t literally see the four humors. They attribute the ultimate cause of disease to hidden things.
Divinae manus
Definition: Means “divine hands.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Shows that the use of drugs has been perfected through testing and produce results that are like a divine influence. Shows that drugs are magical things that can treat you and it departs from early Hippocratic medicine.
Gloria
Definition: Means “fame.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes that other men have not attained considerable honor. He shows that your honor or fame builds up your reputation as a doctor. Practice medicine that right way.
Humanitas
Definition: Means “humane quality” or “human kindness.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes “All gods and men should hate the doctor whose heart lacks compassion and the spirit of human kindness.” This shows what qualities he believed doctors should have. He relates this to The Oath. Treat all regardless of nationality. This is a distinctly Roman addition to medicine.
Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-90 CE)
Definition: Roman army physician.
Location in texts: Dioscorides On Medicinal Substances
Significance/theme: Dioscorides is more comprehensive than many of his precursors. Dioscorides attempts a comprehensive compilation of plants, animals, and other medical substances. He travelled around a lot and saw many different herbs, a pharmacist in a sense. He relates to the idea of a valetudinaria, or military hospital. Dioscorides was a good source of information because he knew the plants really well.
Methodism
Methodism
Definition: A dominant medical theory or sect throughout the Roman world for at least three centuries. Methodism has its name because of its claim to follow a uniquely successful method of healing. Founded by Themison.
Location in texts: Celsus, Themison, Thessalus, and Soranus
Significance/theme: Methodism operates on general principles of disease instead of either pure empirical observation or broader theories of the body. These general principles of disease are constriction, looseness, or some combination of the two. Methodism seems to have more of an ad hoc, or pragmatic, feel from the practice of diatritos. Methodists seem to have employed a corpuscular or atomistic theory.
Communia morborum
Definition: Means “general principles of disease” or “commonalities of disease.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This is the general principle of Methodism. Practitioners believe that it is sufficient to observe certain general characteristics of diseases. There are three classes of characteristics: constriction, looseness, and mixture.
Constriction (“genus adstrictum”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Looseness (“genus fluens”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Soranus of Ephesus (c. 98-138 CE)
Definition: Major figure in Methodism and he is famous for his surviving gynecology. Was the son of a doctor.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology, On Fractures, On Bandages
Significance/theme: Soranus provides us with the most extensive surviving Gynecology from antiquity. He is one of the first to say that virginity is OK, that pregnancy/sex isn’t necessarily the optimal state of health for women. We see a looseness disease, gonorroia, from him. Some parts offer clear cultural stereotypes and biases.
Gonorroia (‘flowing from the genitals’)
Definition: Describes semen.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gonorroia
Significance/theme: The disease is usually chronic and belongs to the “lax” (roôdes) kind.
Hysterikê pnix
Definition: Means “strangulation of the womb.”
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: The disease is of the constricted and violent class and exists both in an acute and chronic form. He writes about what to do in the case of hysterical suffocation.
Sextus Empiricus (c. 160-210 CE)
Definition: A physician and philosopher.
Location in texts: Sextus’ Pyrrhonism
Significance/theme: Sextus Empiricus links Skepticism to Methodism. He is also known for the ten modes of Pyrrhonism. He described how Methodists thinking about medicine is similar to skepticism. He means this idea that Methodists don’t assent to there being hidden causes. They will treat a patient on the fact that these symptoms seem to be there, and this seems to work, but don’t necessarily believe in hidden causes or why they work. Sextus is an example of interweaving of medicine and philosophy in antiquity.
Diatritos
Definition: Means “third day” or every 48 hours. It’s the re-examination every 48 hours.
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: It is a principle of Methodism. It highlights the ad hoc nature of Methodism. It is mocked by Pliny, who believes it’s a money grab.
Metasynkrisis (‘mixing’)
Definition: The modification of pores of the body
Location in texts: Thessalus
Significance/theme: It was a therapy for chronic (rather than acute) diseases. It states how the body is mixed together is important, and changing that to make more lose or more restricted is part of what you do as a doctor
Satyriasis
Definition: “insatiable sexual desire”; like a Satyr
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: It comes out of their methodology and culture and we see a lot of errors they make are connected to cultural presumptions.
Kata phusin
Definition: Means “according to nature.”
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: First two of Soranus’ books are about this. Books 1 and 2 deal with best midwife, abortion, labor, delivery, cutting umbilical cord, and feeding newborn.
Para phusin
Definition: Means “against nature” or abnormal.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: Last two of Soranus’ books are about this. Book 3 and 4 deal with painful menstruation, the inflammation, hemorrhage, and paralysis of uterus, difficult labor, and retention of placenta.
Humoral Alternatives
Pneumatists (believe in pneuma, ‘breath’)
Definition: They believe in pneuma, or breath, that holds the world together. Hot and cold and wet and dry (active and passive principles).
Location in texts: Athenaeus of Attaleia, Claudius Agathinus, Achigenes of Apamea
Significance/theme: Stood in opposition of Methodist.
Athenaeus of Attaleia (60 BCE? Early Empire?)
Definition: Physician and key pneumatist.
Location in texts: Galen, Pneuma, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists
Significance/theme: Founder of the Pneumatic school of medicine. Just as the living body has a pneuma, so the world has one, too. Athenaeus explores parallels between the world and the body.
Claudius Agathinus (1st c. CE)
Definition: Key pneumist.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: Wrote on pulsation and fevers. The surviving evidence suggests a significant interest in bathing, particularly cold baths. Cold baths improve complexions, toned the body, and sharpened senses. Warm baths make one flabby, weak, and pale. Particularly good is a cold bath combined with exercise.
Rufus of Ephesus (50-100 CE?)
Definition: Greek Hippocratic doctor that likely studied in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Rufus’ On Gout, On Diseases of the Bladder and Kidneys, On Satyriasis and Gonorrhea, and On Melancholy
Significance/theme: He committed to the four humors, and also the idea that we are not all naturally the same. His works seem to steer clear of the theoretical (which makes sense if he genuinely believes in the radically individual nature of each person). When looking at theories that compete with Methodism we see that Rufus clearly draws upon the legacy of the four humors. Rufus of Ephesus’s work On Melancholy shows an extended treatment of a disease that largely falls into the explanatory patterns we found in works such as Airs, Waters, Places and The Nature of Man
Core of all these alternatives seem to be connected to a re-interpretation of Hippocratic medicine.
Galen
Nicon
Definition: Galen’s father.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Order of My Own Books
Significance/theme: Nicon, in 146 CE, turns Galen to medicine. He dies in 148/9 CE and Galen then travels to Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria for study. Galen writes, “; in my seventeenth he was persuaded by clear dreams to make me study medicine at the same time as philosophy.” Galen wants to resemble the virtuous life of his father. He received a vision in the Asclepeion that his son would be a physician.
Glaucon
Definition: Philosopher and friend of Galen.
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Glaucon is keen to test whether Galen can really perform correct diagnoses and prognoses.
Pergamum
Definition: Galen’s hometown.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: In 143 CE Galen begins to attend philosophy lectures in Pergamum. In 157 CE Galen was given public appointment as physician to the gladiators in Pergamum. At Pergamum was a library and an Asclepeion (healing temple).
Rete mirabile
Definition: Means “wondrous net.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Utility of the Parts
Significance/theme: Galen uses this to describe the arteries. He says it is a marvelous network and since it was placed by Nature indicates some great use. Galen thinks this is at the base of the brain and gets it from dissecting a sheep. He was not right about everything; this was a public dissection on animals not humans.
Archê
Definition: Means “source.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Doctrines
Significance/theme: This shows how Galen’s knowledge was based on careful observation. There are three systems; one flows from the brain (muscles), a second from the heart (pulse), and a third from the liver (nutrition). The “proof’ of these systems lies in dissection that shows “flow” from a “source.”
Dunamis
Definition: Means “power” or “potential.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Powers of Simple Drugs
Significance/theme: Galen says that “Everything that has some power (dunamis) to alter our nature we call pharmakon, in the same way, I believe, as we also call everything that has some power to increase its substance a foodstuff, and both of these terms are relative in regard to quantity…A dunamis is some active cause, whether in actuality or in prospect.”
Diairesis
Definition: Means “division.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics place heavy emphasis on logical division. It describes the broad analytical process that the physician uses to determine the appropriate treatment for his patient. For example, it may be used to describe the realization that a given symptom or ‘indication’ (endeixis) allows a doctor to know that the disease should be treated with (e.G.) barley gruel rather than another remedy. It is related to the term diorismos, or specification.
Diorismos
Definition: Means “specification” or “clarification.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics has emphasis on this. It similarly considers factors relevant to remedies such as age, gender, and size, and it demonstrates one of the ways in which philosophy was significant for Galen’s medical practice. Galen writes, “Specification then allows the doctor to refine and adjust a general rule to see the extent to which it applies in specific cases.”
Endeixis
Definition: Means “indicator” or “symptom.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Part of Galen therapeutics and in order to avoid confusion you follow the indications of the body. They allow a knowledgeable doctor to make the appropriate categorizations and diagnoses.
Duskrasiai
Definition: Means “imbalances” or “bad mixture.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen says diseases are generally caused by things like imbalances. This shows that he is very similar to a Hippocratic doctor.
Thinning diet (NOT for weight loss…; thinning of humors)
Definition: A method of fixing health.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Thinning Diet
Significance/theme: The Thinning Diet gives us a glimpse into the world of Galen’s dietetics. This treatise seems largely informed by ideas of ‘balance’ and appropriate ‘mixing’ in the humors. It generally recommends strong, pungent foods as ‘thinning.’ This shows the ideas of balance, humor theory, and Hippocratic ideas.
Galen
Significance/theme: We have tons of material from Galen. His “life story” tells us much about his medical practice. His education molded him as a “philosophical” doctor.His experience as a “gladiator” physician gave him ample experience with anatomy and surgery. His experience in Rome demonstrates what a showman he was. He clearly was not afraid to perform and “puff himself up.” He cemented himself as the Hippocratic physician. His teleology shines through in his understanding of anatomy. Galen’s use of drugs is informed by philosophical principles borrowed from Aristotle. Galen was a careful observer. His theory, like all, had strong component in diet and exercise.
The Exercise with the Small Ball
Significance/theme: Gives us insight into Galen’s chief concerns in exercise. He is concerned that exercise involves both the body and the mind; and thinks that the best exercise involves the entire body (arms, legs, etc.) in various ways (vigorous, relaxed, etc.). Variety and balance are good.
Roman Medical Culture
Apuleius of Madauros (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: Roman prose writer.
Location in texts: Apuleius’ Florida and Apology
Significance/theme: Apuleius, in his Apology, shows an extensive knowledge of medicine and philosophy. It shows non-doctors as doctors. He was a sophist and shows that even people who are not doctors do read some technical theories about medicine.
Aidôs
Definition: Means “modesty.”
Location in texts: Galen texts
Significance/theme: Shows how a doctor’s reputation is built. The doctor places great value on the public not observing the patients’ rear or genital region. Makes you trust a doctor in public and private.
Plutarch (c. 46-120 CE)
Definition: Greek historian, biographer, and essayist.
Location in texts: Plutarch’s Lives and How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend)
Significance/theme: Authors such as Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, and Seneca all possess surprisingly extensive medical knowledge. Plutarch attacks the idea of Galen practicing in public.
Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 325-391 CE)
Definition: Roman soldier and historian.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: He shows the legislative efforts to control medicine. He gives us info that at times it seems like you could be put to death for having certain medical magical objects. He shows there are legal restrictions on what medicine can do.
Aelius Aristides (117-181 CE)
Definition: A medical sophist.
Location in texts: Aristides’ Sacred Tales
Significance/theme: He suffered from numerous aliments that he claimed were healed by Asclepius. Although Aristides’ account may be rhetorically embellished, it gives us a clear statement of a personal relationship with Asclepius and some of the ‘cures’ that were undertaken in the name of the god. He tells us that ancient medicine in the second century still existed in parallel to religious medicine, basically has dreams about Asclepius, and pursues a medical regimen that is VERY counter to what Galen would prescribe or suggest (much less scientific).
Augustine of Hippo (345-430 CE)
Definition: Theologian and philosopher in Rome.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: Sets the scene of the parameters of religion at Rome. He gives us evidence about Roman religion and how the Romans had a god for almost everything.
Roman Religion
Cloacina
Definition: Roman goddess of sewers
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
Flora
Definition: Roman goddess of flowers.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
M. Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE)
Definition: Ancient Roman scholar and writer.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God, Varro’s Nine Books of Disciplines
Significance/theme: His Nine Books of Disciplines became a model for later encyclopedists, especially Pliny the Elder. Varro decided to focus on identifying nine of these arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture. Using Varro’s list, subsequent writers defined the seven classical “liberal arts of the medieval schools”
Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: A rhetorician and satirist who wrote in Greek language.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: He is skeptic of Asclepius cult. Not all in the Roman world trusted anything associated with Asclepius: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. There are people who are skeptical of Asclepius and people that take advantage of the gullible.
Alexander of Abonoteichus
Definition: A false prophet who hatches a baby snake from a goose egg.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. Shows there are people who take advantage of those that are gullible and believe in Asclepius cult.
Plato
Plato
Definition: Philosopher in Greece.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus, and Phaedrus
Significance/theme: Shows philosophical medicine. Student of his was Aristotle.
Teleology (the study of ends)
Definition: Means “the study of ends.” There is an end, or goal, that humans are created towards. Things are made in order to do something.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: It is a study that underwrites many of the biological explanations of both Plato and Aristotle. These are explanations that border on the religious, but they can be articulated v. Differently and indeed scientifically. Such explanations have far-reaching consequences for all aspects of medicine and biology. Disease is the reverse of nature and how things should go.
Dêmiourgos
Definition: A demiurge, or being that is responsible for the creation of the universe.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: In Timaeus Plato says that the world is crafter by a demiurge, or craftsman, who gives order to the world by looking at the external, unchanging “forms.”
Cholê
Definition: Means “bile.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Plato’s mentioning of bile means he was likely exposes to the ideas of humors.
Phaedo
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a dialogue with Socrates.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: This work shows the idea of teleology. It doesn’t just explain why they are how they are but why they are the best.
Nous
Definition: Means mind
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that it is the mind (nous) that arranges and causes all things and he was pleased with this theory of cause, and it seemed to him to be somehow right that the mind should be the cause of all things.
Beltiston
Definition: Means “what is best.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that the mind arranges everything and establishes each thing as it is best for it to be.
Timaeus
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a rhetorical display rather than a typical “dialogue.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Timaeus gives an account of the origins of the physical world and says it is crafted by dêmiourgos. Timaeus develops a theory of the ‘receptacle’ (hypodochê), a featureless material onto which the craftsman places ‘Formal’ constraints. It is a creation story like we find in Empedocles. The lengthy speech delivered by Timaeus ultimately addresses the topic of diseases of the body and the soul and their remedies. Timaeus’ theories about the origins of disease sound not wholly unlike explanations found in the Hippocratic corpus. Plato’s Timaeus offers an account of disease that bears many similarities to Hippocratic accounts as well as to Empedocles’ ‘four roots’ theory of the world (or even to Philistion in the Anonymus Londinensis).
Aristotle
Aristotle
Definition: Aristotle was a philosopher, scientist, and student of Plato. His father was a doctor.
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Problems, History of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, On the Generation of Animals
Significance/theme: Methodologically, he is much closer to modern, empiricalscience. He has an extensive interest in biology of all sorts. He operates on classification (based on observation and assumption). In his biological works, goes into great detail about differences between various different types of animals and even different genders of animals. His focus is on classification and separation of the different types of animals, but this focus can give us interesting medical information. He was an early inspiration for Galen’s idea that you need to be both empiricist and rationalists to be successful. He also studies animals.
Aitiai
Definition: Means “causes.”
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Parts of Animals
Significance/theme: Aristotle is interested in substances and what they cause. His explanation of disease is like “what is the ultimate cause of ‘x’?”
Ousia
Definition: Means “substance.”
Location in texts: Aristotle
Significance/theme: Aristotle was interested in substance and what it causes. For example, what makes a certain animal what it is?
Herophilus
Herophilus (325-255 BCE)
Definition: Herophilus was a Greek physician who practiced in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Herophilus’ Anatomy, On Eyes, On Pulses, Therapeutics
Significance/theme: He is the first anatomist and father of anatomy. He systematically performed many dissections. He was a trans-figure, both rationalist and empiricist. Herophilus was not afraid of breaking previous views. He found a lot of knowledge about the human body. Big contributions include: pulse, veins, eye, and nerves.
Hagnodice
Definition: Herophilus taught her.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: She desired to learn medicine. So she pretended to be a male. Women didn’t trust “him” but then she revealed she was a woman. This showed a culture shift for women, a different world for medical knowledge.
Arachnoeides
Definition: Means “cobweb-like.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was used describing the anatomy of the eye. It shows the extremely detailed dissections that Herophilus would do.
Sphygmos
Definition: Means “pulse.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Shows an impressive level of detail about Herophilus’ works.
Thesis
Definition: Means “down-beat.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Herophilus uses this describing pulse. He says that the dilation of the artery is analogous to the down-beat. Compared it to how musicians have up-beat and down-beat.
Rationalist (dogmatist)
Definition: Herophilus was a rationalist and first established the school.
Location in texts: In Celsus’ Preface
Significance/theme: They believe in a theory of the body, like the four humors, as opposed to empirical school where they observe and give advice based on observation (experience). Galen believes in some hidden cause theory. You can’t literally see the four humors. They attribute the ultimate cause of disease to hidden things.
Divinae manus
Definition: Means “divine hands.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Shows that the use of drugs has been perfected through testing and produce results that are like a divine influence. Shows that drugs are magical things that can treat you and it departs from early Hippocratic medicine.
Gloria
Definition: Means “fame.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes that other men have not attained considerable honor. He shows that your honor or fame builds up your reputation as a doctor. Practice medicine that right way.
Humanitas
Definition: Means “humane quality” or “human kindness.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes “All gods and men should hate the doctor whose heart lacks compassion and the spirit of human kindness.” This shows what qualities he believed doctors should have. He relates this to The Oath. Treat all regardless of nationality. This is a distinctly Roman addition to medicine.
Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-90 CE)
Definition: Roman army physician.
Location in texts: Dioscorides On Medicinal Substances
Significance/theme: Dioscorides is more comprehensive than many of his precursors. Dioscorides attempts a comprehensive compilation of plants, animals, and other medical substances. He travelled around a lot and saw many different herbs, a pharmacist in a sense. He relates to the idea of a valetudinaria, or military hospital. Dioscorides was a good source of information because he knew the plants really well.
Methodism
Methodism
Definition: A dominant medical theory or sect throughout the Roman world for at least three centuries. Methodism has its name because of its claim to follow a uniquely successful method of healing. Founded by Themison.
Location in texts: Celsus, Themison, Thessalus, and Soranus
Significance/theme: Methodism operates on general principles of disease instead of either pure empirical observation or broader theories of the body. These general principles of disease are constriction, looseness, or some combination of the two. Methodism seems to have more of an ad hoc, or pragmatic, feel from the practice of diatritos. Methodists seem to have employed a corpuscular or atomistic theory.
Communia morborum
Definition: Means “general principles of disease” or “commonalities of disease.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This is the general principle of Methodism. Practitioners believe that it is sufficient to observe certain general characteristics of diseases. There are three classes of characteristics: constriction, looseness, and mixture.
Constriction (“genus adstrictum”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Looseness (“genus fluens”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Soranus of Ephesus (c. 98-138 CE)
Definition: Major figure in Methodism and he is famous for his surviving gynecology. Was the son of a doctor.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology, On Fractures, On Bandages
Significance/theme: Soranus provides us with the most extensive surviving Gynecology from antiquity. He is one of the first to say that virginity is OK, that pregnancy/sex isn’t necessarily the optimal state of health for women. We see a looseness disease, gonorroia, from him. Some parts offer clear cultural stereotypes and biases.
Gonorroia (‘flowing from the genitals’)
Definition: Describes semen.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gonorroia
Significance/theme: The disease is usually chronic and belongs to the “lax” (roôdes) kind.
Hysterikê pnix
Definition: Means “strangulation of the womb.”
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: The disease is of the constricted and violent class and exists both in an acute and chronic form. He writes about what to do in the case of hysterical suffocation.
Sextus Empiricus (c. 160-210 CE)
Definition: A physician and philosopher.
Location in texts: Sextus’ Pyrrhonism
Significance/theme: Sextus Empiricus links Skepticism to Methodism. He is also known for the ten modes of Pyrrhonism. He described how Methodists thinking about medicine is similar to skepticism. He means this idea that Methodists don’t assent to there being hidden causes. They will treat a patient on the fact that these symptoms seem to be there, and this seems to work, but don’t necessarily believe in hidden causes or why they work. Sextus is an example of interweaving of medicine and philosophy in antiquity.
Diatritos
Definition: Means “third day” or every 48 hours. It’s the re-examination every 48 hours.
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: It is a principle of Methodism. It highlights the ad hoc nature of Methodism. It is mocked by Pliny, who believes it’s a money grab.
Metasynkrisis (‘mixing’)
Definition: The modification of pores of the body
Location in texts: Thessalus
Significance/theme: It was a therapy for chronic (rather than acute) diseases. It states how the body is mixed together is important, and changing that to make more lose or more restricted is part of what you do as a doctor
Satyriasis
Definition: “insatiable sexual desire”; like a Satyr
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: It comes out of their methodology and culture and we see a lot of errors they make are connected to cultural presumptions.
Kata phusin
Definition: Means “according to nature.”
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: First two of Soranus’ books are about this. Books 1 and 2 deal with best midwife, abortion, labor, delivery, cutting umbilical cord, and feeding newborn.
Para phusin
Definition: Means “against nature” or abnormal.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: Last two of Soranus’ books are about this. Book 3 and 4 deal with painful menstruation, the inflammation, hemorrhage, and paralysis of uterus, difficult labor, and retention of placenta.
Humoral Alternatives
Pneumatists (believe in pneuma, ‘breath’)
Definition: They believe in pneuma, or breath, that holds the world together. Hot and cold and wet and dry (active and passive principles).
Location in texts: Athenaeus of Attaleia, Claudius Agathinus, Achigenes of Apamea
Significance/theme: Stood in opposition of Methodist.
Athenaeus of Attaleia (60 BCE? Early Empire?)
Definition: Physician and key pneumatist.
Location in texts: Galen, Pneuma, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists
Significance/theme: Founder of the Pneumatic school of medicine. Just as the living body has a pneuma, so the world has one, too. Athenaeus explores parallels between the world and the body.
Claudius Agathinus (1st c. CE)
Definition: Key pneumist.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: Wrote on pulsation and fevers. The surviving evidence suggests a significant interest in bathing, particularly cold baths. Cold baths improve complexions, toned the body, and sharpened senses. Warm baths make one flabby, weak, and pale. Particularly good is a cold bath combined with exercise.
Rufus of Ephesus (50-100 CE?)
Definition: Greek Hippocratic doctor that likely studied in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Rufus’ On Gout, On Diseases of the Bladder and Kidneys, On Satyriasis and Gonorrhea, and On Melancholy
Significance/theme: He committed to the four humors, and also the idea that we are not all naturally the same. His works seem to steer clear of the theoretical (which makes sense if he genuinely believes in the radically individual nature of each person). When looking at theories that compete with Methodism we see that Rufus clearly draws upon the legacy of the four humors. Rufus of Ephesus’s work On Melancholy shows an extended treatment of a disease that largely falls into the explanatory patterns we found in works such as Airs, Waters, Places and The Nature of Man
Core of all these alternatives seem to be connected to a re-interpretation of Hippocratic medicine.
Galen
Nicon
Definition: Galen’s father.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Order of My Own Books
Significance/theme: Nicon, in 146 CE, turns Galen to medicine. He dies in 148/9 CE and Galen then travels to Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria for study. Galen writes, “; in my seventeenth he was persuaded by clear dreams to make me study medicine at the same time as philosophy.” Galen wants to resemble the virtuous life of his father. He received a vision in the Asclepeion that his son would be a physician.
Glaucon
Definition: Philosopher and friend of Galen.
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Glaucon is keen to test whether Galen can really perform correct diagnoses and prognoses.
Pergamum
Definition: Galen’s hometown.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: In 143 CE Galen begins to attend philosophy lectures in Pergamum. In 157 CE Galen was given public appointment as physician to the gladiators in Pergamum. At Pergamum was a library and an Asclepeion (healing temple).
Rete mirabile
Definition: Means “wondrous net.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Utility of the Parts
Significance/theme: Galen uses this to describe the arteries. He says it is a marvelous network and since it was placed by Nature indicates some great use. Galen thinks this is at the base of the brain and gets it from dissecting a sheep. He was not right about everything; this was a public dissection on animals not humans.
Archê
Definition: Means “source.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Doctrines
Significance/theme: This shows how Galen’s knowledge was based on careful observation. There are three systems; one flows from the brain (muscles), a second from the heart (pulse), and a third from the liver (nutrition). The “proof’ of these systems lies in dissection that shows “flow” from a “source.”
Dunamis
Definition: Means “power” or “potential.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Powers of Simple Drugs
Significance/theme: Galen says that “Everything that has some power (dunamis) to alter our nature we call pharmakon, in the same way, I believe, as we also call everything that has some power to increase its substance a foodstuff, and both of these terms are relative in regard to quantity…A dunamis is some active cause, whether in actuality or in prospect.”
Diairesis
Definition: Means “division.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics place heavy emphasis on logical division. It describes the broad analytical process that the physician uses to determine the appropriate treatment for his patient. For example, it may be used to describe the realization that a given symptom or ‘indication’ (endeixis) allows a doctor to know that the disease should be treated with (e.G.) barley gruel rather than another remedy. It is related to the term diorismos, or specification.
Diorismos
Definition: Means “specification” or “clarification.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics has emphasis on this. It similarly considers factors relevant to remedies such as age, gender, and size, and it demonstrates one of the ways in which philosophy was significant for Galen’s medical practice. Galen writes, “Specification then allows the doctor to refine and adjust a general rule to see the extent to which it applies in specific cases.”
Endeixis
Definition: Means “indicator” or “symptom.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Part of Galen therapeutics and in order to avoid confusion you follow the indications of the body. They allow a knowledgeable doctor to make the appropriate categorizations and diagnoses.
Duskrasiai
Definition: Means “imbalances” or “bad mixture.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen says diseases are generally caused by things like imbalances. This shows that he is very similar to a Hippocratic doctor.
Thinning diet (NOT for weight loss…; thinning of humors)
Definition: A method of fixing health.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Thinning Diet
Significance/theme: The Thinning Diet gives us a glimpse into the world of Galen’s dietetics. This treatise seems largely informed by ideas of ‘balance’ and appropriate ‘mixing’ in the humors. It generally recommends strong, pungent foods as ‘thinning.’ This shows the ideas of balance, humor theory, and Hippocratic ideas.
Galen
Significance/theme: We have tons of material from Galen. His “life story” tells us much about his medical practice. His education molded him as a “philosophical” doctor.His experience as a “gladiator” physician gave him ample experience with anatomy and surgery. His experience in Rome demonstrates what a showman he was. He clearly was not afraid to perform and “puff himself up.” He cemented himself as the Hippocratic physician. His teleology shines through in his understanding of anatomy. Galen’s use of drugs is informed by philosophical principles borrowed from Aristotle. Galen was a careful observer. His theory, like all, had strong component in diet and exercise.
The Exercise with the Small Ball
Significance/theme: Gives us insight into Galen’s chief concerns in exercise. He is concerned that exercise involves both the body and the mind; and thinks that the best exercise involves the entire body (arms, legs, etc.) in various ways (vigorous, relaxed, etc.). Variety and balance are good.
Roman Medical Culture
Apuleius of Madauros (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: Roman prose writer.
Location in texts: Apuleius’ Florida and Apology
Significance/theme: Apuleius, in his Apology, shows an extensive knowledge of medicine and philosophy. It shows non-doctors as doctors. He was a sophist and shows that even people who are not doctors do read some technical theories about medicine.
Aidôs
Definition: Means “modesty.”
Location in texts: Galen texts
Significance/theme: Shows how a doctor’s reputation is built. The doctor places great value on the public not observing the patients’ rear or genital region. Makes you trust a doctor in public and private.
Plutarch (c. 46-120 CE)
Definition: Greek historian, biographer, and essayist.
Location in texts: Plutarch’s Lives and How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend)
Significance/theme: Authors such as Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, and Seneca all possess surprisingly extensive medical knowledge. Plutarch attacks the idea of Galen practicing in public.
Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 325-391 CE)
Definition: Roman soldier and historian.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: He shows the legislative efforts to control medicine. He gives us info that at times it seems like you could be put to death for having certain medical magical objects. He shows there are legal restrictions on what medicine can do.
Aelius Aristides (117-181 CE)
Definition: A medical sophist.
Location in texts: Aristides’ Sacred Tales
Significance/theme: He suffered from numerous aliments that he claimed were healed by Asclepius. Although Aristides’ account may be rhetorically embellished, it gives us a clear statement of a personal relationship with Asclepius and some of the ‘cures’ that were undertaken in the name of the god. He tells us that ancient medicine in the second century still existed in parallel to religious medicine, basically has dreams about Asclepius, and pursues a medical regimen that is VERY counter to what Galen would prescribe or suggest (much less scientific).
Augustine of Hippo (345-430 CE)
Definition: Theologian and philosopher in Rome.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: Sets the scene of the parameters of religion at Rome. He gives us evidence about Roman religion and how the Romans had a god for almost everything.
Roman Religion
Cloacina
Definition: Roman goddess of sewers
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
Flora
Definition: Roman goddess of flowers.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
M. Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE)
Definition: Ancient Roman scholar and writer.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God, Varro’s Nine Books of Disciplines
Significance/theme: His Nine Books of Disciplines became a model for later encyclopedists, especially Pliny the Elder. Varro decided to focus on identifying nine of these arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture. Using Varro’s list, subsequent writers defined the seven classical “liberal arts of the medieval schools”
Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: A rhetorician and satirist who wrote in Greek language.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: He is skeptic of Asclepius cult. Not all in the Roman world trusted anything associated with Asclepius: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. There are people who are skeptical of Asclepius and people that take advantage of the gullible.
Alexander of Abonoteichus
Definition: A false prophet who hatches a baby snake from a goose egg.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. Shows there are people who take advantage of those that are gullible and believe in Asclepius cult.
Plato
Plato
Definition: Philosopher in Greece.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus, and Phaedrus
Significance/theme: Shows philosophical medicine. Student of his was Aristotle.
Teleology (the study of ends)
Definition: Means “the study of ends.” There is an end, or goal, that humans are created towards. Things are made in order to do something.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: It is a study that underwrites many of the biological explanations of both Plato and Aristotle. These are explanations that border on the religious, but they can be articulated v. Differently and indeed scientifically. Such explanations have far-reaching consequences for all aspects of medicine and biology. Disease is the reverse of nature and how things should go.
Dêmiourgos
Definition: A demiurge, or being that is responsible for the creation of the universe.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: In Timaeus Plato says that the world is crafter by a demiurge, or craftsman, who gives order to the world by looking at the external, unchanging “forms.”
Cholê
Definition: Means “bile.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Plato’s mentioning of bile means he was likely exposes to the ideas of humors.
Phaedo
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a dialogue with Socrates.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: This work shows the idea of teleology. It doesn’t just explain why they are how they are but why they are the best.
Nous
Definition: Means mind
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that it is the mind (nous) that arranges and causes all things and he was pleased with this theory of cause, and it seemed to him to be somehow right that the mind should be the cause of all things.
Beltiston
Definition: Means “what is best.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that the mind arranges everything and establishes each thing as it is best for it to be.
Timaeus
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a rhetorical display rather than a typical “dialogue.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Timaeus gives an account of the origins of the physical world and says it is crafted by dêmiourgos. Timaeus develops a theory of the ‘receptacle’ (hypodochê), a featureless material onto which the craftsman places ‘Formal’ constraints. It is a creation story like we find in Empedocles. The lengthy speech delivered by Timaeus ultimately addresses the topic of diseases of the body and the soul and their remedies. Timaeus’ theories about the origins of disease sound not wholly unlike explanations found in the Hippocratic corpus. Plato’s Timaeus offers an account of disease that bears many similarities to Hippocratic accounts as well as to Empedocles’ ‘four roots’ theory of the world (or even to Philistion in the Anonymus Londinensis).
Aristotle
Aristotle
Definition: Aristotle was a philosopher, scientist, and student of Plato. His father was a doctor.
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Problems, History of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, On the Generation of Animals
Significance/theme: Methodologically, he is much closer to modern, empiricalscience. He has an extensive interest in biology of all sorts. He operates on classification (based on observation and assumption). In his biological works, goes into great detail about differences between various different types of animals and even different genders of animals. His focus is on classification and separation of the different types of animals, but this focus can give us interesting medical information. He was an early inspiration for Galen’s idea that you need to be both empiricist and rationalists to be successful. He also studies animals.
Aitiai
Definition: Means “causes.”
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Parts of Animals
Significance/theme: Aristotle is interested in substances and what they cause. His explanation of disease is like “what is the ultimate cause of ‘x’?”
Ousia
Definition: Means “substance.”
Location in texts: Aristotle
Significance/theme: Aristotle was interested in substance and what it causes. For example, what makes a certain animal what it is?
Herophilus
Herophilus (325-255 BCE)
Definition: Herophilus was a Greek physician who practiced in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Herophilus’ Anatomy, On Eyes, On Pulses, Therapeutics
Significance/theme: He is the first anatomist and father of anatomy. He systematically performed many dissections. He was a trans-figure, both rationalist and empiricist. Herophilus was not afraid of breaking previous views. He found a lot of knowledge about the human body. Big contributions include: pulse, veins, eye, and nerves.
Hagnodice
Definition: Herophilus taught her.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: She desired to learn medicine. So she pretended to be a male. Women didn’t trust “him” but then she revealed she was a woman. This showed a culture shift for women, a different world for medical knowledge.
Arachnoeides
Definition: Means “cobweb-like.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was used describing the anatomy of the eye. It shows the extremely detailed dissections that Herophilus would do.
Sphygmos
Definition: Means “pulse.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Shows an impressive level of detail about Herophilus’ works.
Thesis
Definition: Means “down-beat.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Herophilus uses this describing pulse. He says that the dilation of the artery is analogous to the down-beat. Compared it to how musicians have up-beat and down-beat.
Rationalist (dogmatist)
Definition: Herophilus was a rationalist and first established the school.
Location in texts: In Celsus’ Preface
Significance/theme: They believe in a theory of the body, like the four humors, as opposed to empirical school where they observe and give advice based on observation (experience). Galen believes in some hidden cause theory. You can’t literally see the four humors. They attribute the ultimate cause of disease to hidden things.
Divinae manus
Definition: Means “divine hands.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Shows that the use of drugs has been perfected through testing and produce results that are like a divine influence. Shows that drugs are magical things that can treat you and it departs from early Hippocratic medicine.
Gloria
Definition: Means “fame.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes that other men have not attained considerable honor. He shows that your honor or fame builds up your reputation as a doctor. Practice medicine that right way.
Humanitas
Definition: Means “humane quality” or “human kindness.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes “All gods and men should hate the doctor whose heart lacks compassion and the spirit of human kindness.” This shows what qualities he believed doctors should have. He relates this to The Oath. Treat all regardless of nationality. This is a distinctly Roman addition to medicine.
Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-90 CE)
Definition: Roman army physician.
Location in texts: Dioscorides On Medicinal Substances
Significance/theme: Dioscorides is more comprehensive than many of his precursors. Dioscorides attempts a comprehensive compilation of plants, animals, and other medical substances. He travelled around a lot and saw many different herbs, a pharmacist in a sense. He relates to the idea of a valetudinaria, or military hospital. Dioscorides was a good source of information because he knew the plants really well.
Methodism
Methodism
Definition: A dominant medical theory or sect throughout the Roman world for at least three centuries. Methodism has its name because of its claim to follow a uniquely successful method of healing. Founded by Themison.
Location in texts: Celsus, Themison, Thessalus, and Soranus
Significance/theme: Methodism operates on general principles of disease instead of either pure empirical observation or broader theories of the body. These general principles of disease are constriction, looseness, or some combination of the two. Methodism seems to have more of an ad hoc, or pragmatic, feel from the practice of diatritos. Methodists seem to have employed a corpuscular or atomistic theory.
Communia morborum
Definition: Means “general principles of disease” or “commonalities of disease.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This is the general principle of Methodism. Practitioners believe that it is sufficient to observe certain general characteristics of diseases. There are three classes of characteristics: constriction, looseness, and mixture.
Constriction (“genus adstrictum”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Looseness (“genus fluens”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Soranus of Ephesus (c. 98-138 CE)
Definition: Major figure in Methodism and he is famous for his surviving gynecology. Was the son of a doctor.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology, On Fractures, On Bandages
Significance/theme: Soranus provides us with the most extensive surviving Gynecology from antiquity. He is one of the first to say that virginity is OK, that pregnancy/sex isn’t necessarily the optimal state of health for women. We see a looseness disease, gonorroia, from him. Some parts offer clear cultural stereotypes and biases.
Gonorroia (‘flowing from the genitals’)
Definition: Describes semen.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gonorroia
Significance/theme: The disease is usually chronic and belongs to the “lax” (roôdes) kind.
Hysterikê pnix
Definition: Means “strangulation of the womb.”
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: The disease is of the constricted and violent class and exists both in an acute and chronic form. He writes about what to do in the case of hysterical suffocation.
Sextus Empiricus (c. 160-210 CE)
Definition: A physician and philosopher.
Location in texts: Sextus’ Pyrrhonism
Significance/theme: Sextus Empiricus links Skepticism to Methodism. He is also known for the ten modes of Pyrrhonism. He described how Methodists thinking about medicine is similar to skepticism. He means this idea that Methodists don’t assent to there being hidden causes. They will treat a patient on the fact that these symptoms seem to be there, and this seems to work, but don’t necessarily believe in hidden causes or why they work. Sextus is an example of interweaving of medicine and philosophy in antiquity.
Diatritos
Definition: Means “third day” or every 48 hours. It’s the re-examination every 48 hours.
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: It is a principle of Methodism. It highlights the ad hoc nature of Methodism. It is mocked by Pliny, who believes it’s a money grab.
Metasynkrisis (‘mixing’)
Definition: The modification of pores of the body
Location in texts: Thessalus
Significance/theme: It was a therapy for chronic (rather than acute) diseases. It states how the body is mixed together is important, and changing that to make more lose or more restricted is part of what you do as a doctor
Satyriasis
Definition: “insatiable sexual desire”; like a Satyr
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: It comes out of their methodology and culture and we see a lot of errors they make are connected to cultural presumptions.
Kata phusin
Definition: Means “according to nature.”
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: First two of Soranus’ books are about this. Books 1 and 2 deal with best midwife, abortion, labor, delivery, cutting umbilical cord, and feeding newborn.
Para phusin
Definition: Means “against nature” or abnormal.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: Last two of Soranus’ books are about this. Book 3 and 4 deal with painful menstruation, the inflammation, hemorrhage, and paralysis of uterus, difficult labor, and retention of placenta.
Humoral Alternatives
Pneumatists (believe in pneuma, ‘breath’)
Definition: They believe in pneuma, or breath, that holds the world together. Hot and cold and wet and dry (active and passive principles).
Location in texts: Athenaeus of Attaleia, Claudius Agathinus, Achigenes of Apamea
Significance/theme: Stood in opposition of Methodist.
Athenaeus of Attaleia (60 BCE? Early Empire?)
Definition: Physician and key pneumatist.
Location in texts: Galen, Pneuma, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists
Significance/theme: Founder of the Pneumatic school of medicine. Just as the living body has a pneuma, so the world has one, too. Athenaeus explores parallels between the world and the body.
Claudius Agathinus (1st c. CE)
Definition: Key pneumist.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: Wrote on pulsation and fevers. The surviving evidence suggests a significant interest in bathing, particularly cold baths. Cold baths improve complexions, toned the body, and sharpened senses. Warm baths make one flabby, weak, and pale. Particularly good is a cold bath combined with exercise.
Rufus of Ephesus (50-100 CE?)
Definition: Greek Hippocratic doctor that likely studied in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Rufus’ On Gout, On Diseases of the Bladder and Kidneys, On Satyriasis and Gonorrhea, and On Melancholy
Significance/theme: He committed to the four humors, and also the idea that we are not all naturally the same. His works seem to steer clear of the theoretical (which makes sense if he genuinely believes in the radically individual nature of each person). When looking at theories that compete with Methodism we see that Rufus clearly draws upon the legacy of the four humors. Rufus of Ephesus’s work On Melancholy shows an extended treatment of a disease that largely falls into the explanatory patterns we found in works such as Airs, Waters, Places and The Nature of Man
Core of all these alternatives seem to be connected to a re-interpretation of Hippocratic medicine.
Galen
Nicon
Definition: Galen’s father.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Order of My Own Books
Significance/theme: Nicon, in 146 CE, turns Galen to medicine. He dies in 148/9 CE and Galen then travels to Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria for study. Galen writes, “; in my seventeenth he was persuaded by clear dreams to make me study medicine at the same time as philosophy.” Galen wants to resemble the virtuous life of his father. He received a vision in the Asclepeion that his son would be a physician.
Glaucon
Definition: Philosopher and friend of Galen.
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Glaucon is keen to test whether Galen can really perform correct diagnoses and prognoses.
Pergamum
Definition: Galen’s hometown.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: In 143 CE Galen begins to attend philosophy lectures in Pergamum. In 157 CE Galen was given public appointment as physician to the gladiators in Pergamum. At Pergamum was a library and an Asclepeion (healing temple).
Rete mirabile
Definition: Means “wondrous net.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Utility of the Parts
Significance/theme: Galen uses this to describe the arteries. He says it is a marvelous network and since it was placed by Nature indicates some great use. Galen thinks this is at the base of the brain and gets it from dissecting a sheep. He was not right about everything; this was a public dissection on animals not humans.
Archê
Definition: Means “source.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Doctrines
Significance/theme: This shows how Galen’s knowledge was based on careful observation. There are three systems; one flows from the brain (muscles), a second from the heart (pulse), and a third from the liver (nutrition). The “proof’ of these systems lies in dissection that shows “flow” from a “source.”
Dunamis
Definition: Means “power” or “potential.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Powers of Simple Drugs
Significance/theme: Galen says that “Everything that has some power (dunamis) to alter our nature we call pharmakon, in the same way, I believe, as we also call everything that has some power to increase its substance a foodstuff, and both of these terms are relative in regard to quantity…A dunamis is some active cause, whether in actuality or in prospect.”
Diairesis
Definition: Means “division.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics place heavy emphasis on logical division. It describes the broad analytical process that the physician uses to determine the appropriate treatment for his patient. For example, it may be used to describe the realization that a given symptom or ‘indication’ (endeixis) allows a doctor to know that the disease should be treated with (e.G.) barley gruel rather than another remedy. It is related to the term diorismos, or specification.
Diorismos
Definition: Means “specification” or “clarification.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics has emphasis on this. It similarly considers factors relevant to remedies such as age, gender, and size, and it demonstrates one of the ways in which philosophy was significant for Galen’s medical practice. Galen writes, “Specification then allows the doctor to refine and adjust a general rule to see the extent to which it applies in specific cases.”
Endeixis
Definition: Means “indicator” or “symptom.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Part of Galen therapeutics and in order to avoid confusion you follow the indications of the body. They allow a knowledgeable doctor to make the appropriate categorizations and diagnoses.
Duskrasiai
Definition: Means “imbalances” or “bad mixture.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen says diseases are generally caused by things like imbalances. This shows that he is very similar to a Hippocratic doctor.
Thinning diet (NOT for weight loss…; thinning of humors)
Definition: A method of fixing health.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Thinning Diet
Significance/theme: The Thinning Diet gives us a glimpse into the world of Galen’s dietetics. This treatise seems largely informed by ideas of ‘balance’ and appropriate ‘mixing’ in the humors. It generally recommends strong, pungent foods as ‘thinning.’ This shows the ideas of balance, humor theory, and Hippocratic ideas.
Galen
Significance/theme: We have tons of material from Galen. His “life story” tells us much about his medical practice. His education molded him as a “philosophical” doctor.His experience as a “gladiator” physician gave him ample experience with anatomy and surgery. His experience in Rome demonstrates what a showman he was. He clearly was not afraid to perform and “puff himself up.” He cemented himself as the Hippocratic physician. His teleology shines through in his understanding of anatomy. Galen’s use of drugs is informed by philosophical principles borrowed from Aristotle. Galen was a careful observer. His theory, like all, had strong component in diet and exercise.
The Exercise with the Small Ball
Significance/theme: Gives us insight into Galen’s chief concerns in exercise. He is concerned that exercise involves both the body and the mind; and thinks that the best exercise involves the entire body (arms, legs, etc.) in various ways (vigorous, relaxed, etc.). Variety and balance are good.
Roman Medical Culture
Apuleius of Madauros (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: Roman prose writer.
Location in texts: Apuleius’ Florida and Apology
Significance/theme: Apuleius, in his Apology, shows an extensive knowledge of medicine and philosophy. It shows non-doctors as doctors. He was a sophist and shows that even people who are not doctors do read some technical theories about medicine.
Aidôs
Definition: Means “modesty.”
Location in texts: Galen texts
Significance/theme: Shows how a doctor’s reputation is built. The doctor places great value on the public not observing the patients’ rear or genital region. Makes you trust a doctor in public and private.
Plutarch (c. 46-120 CE)
Definition: Greek historian, biographer, and essayist.
Location in texts: Plutarch’s Lives and How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend)
Significance/theme: Authors such as Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, and Seneca all possess surprisingly extensive medical knowledge. Plutarch attacks the idea of Galen practicing in public.
Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 325-391 CE)
Definition: Roman soldier and historian.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: He shows the legislative efforts to control medicine. He gives us info that at times it seems like you could be put to death for having certain medical magical objects. He shows there are legal restrictions on what medicine can do.
Aelius Aristides (117-181 CE)
Definition: A medical sophist.
Location in texts: Aristides’ Sacred Tales
Significance/theme: He suffered from numerous aliments that he claimed were healed by Asclepius. Although Aristides’ account may be rhetorically embellished, it gives us a clear statement of a personal relationship with Asclepius and some of the ‘cures’ that were undertaken in the name of the god. He tells us that ancient medicine in the second century still existed in parallel to religious medicine, basically has dreams about Asclepius, and pursues a medical regimen that is VERY counter to what Galen would prescribe or suggest (much less scientific).
Augustine of Hippo (345-430 CE)
Definition: Theologian and philosopher in Rome.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: Sets the scene of the parameters of religion at Rome. He gives us evidence about Roman religion and how the Romans had a god for almost everything.
Roman Religion
Cloacina
Definition: Roman goddess of sewers
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
Flora
Definition: Roman goddess of flowers.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
M. Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE)
Definition: Ancient Roman scholar and writer.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God, Varro’s Nine Books of Disciplines
Significance/theme: His Nine Books of Disciplines became a model for later encyclopedists, especially Pliny the Elder. Varro decided to focus on identifying nine of these arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture. Using Varro’s list, subsequent writers defined the seven classical “liberal arts of the medieval schools”
Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: A rhetorician and satirist who wrote in Greek language.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: He is skeptic of Asclepius cult. Not all in the Roman world trusted anything associated with Asclepius: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. There are people who are skeptical of Asclepius and people that take advantage of the gullible.
Alexander of Abonoteichus
Definition: A false prophet who hatches a baby snake from a goose egg.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. Shows there are people who take advantage of those that are gullible and believe in Asclepius cult.
Plato
Plato
Definition: Philosopher in Greece.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus, and Phaedrus
Significance/theme: Shows philosophical medicine. Student of his was Aristotle.
Teleology (the study of ends)
Definition: Means “the study of ends.” There is an end, or goal, that humans are created towards. Things are made in order to do something.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: It is a study that underwrites many of the biological explanations of both Plato and Aristotle. These are explanations that border on the religious, but they can be articulated v. Differently and indeed scientifically. Such explanations have far-reaching consequences for all aspects of medicine and biology. Disease is the reverse of nature and how things should go.
Dêmiourgos
Definition: A demiurge, or being that is responsible for the creation of the universe.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: In Timaeus Plato says that the world is crafter by a demiurge, or craftsman, who gives order to the world by looking at the external, unchanging “forms.”
Cholê
Definition: Means “bile.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Plato’s mentioning of bile means he was likely exposes to the ideas of humors.
Phaedo
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a dialogue with Socrates.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: This work shows the idea of teleology. It doesn’t just explain why they are how they are but why they are the best.
Nous
Definition: Means mind
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that it is the mind (nous) that arranges and causes all things and he was pleased with this theory of cause, and it seemed to him to be somehow right that the mind should be the cause of all things.
Beltiston
Definition: Means “what is best.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that the mind arranges everything and establishes each thing as it is best for it to be.
Timaeus
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a rhetorical display rather than a typical “dialogue.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Timaeus gives an account of the origins of the physical world and says it is crafted by dêmiourgos. Timaeus develops a theory of the ‘receptacle’ (hypodochê), a featureless material onto which the craftsman places ‘Formal’ constraints. It is a creation story like we find in Empedocles. The lengthy speech delivered by Timaeus ultimately addresses the topic of diseases of the body and the soul and their remedies. Timaeus’ theories about the origins of disease sound not wholly unlike explanations found in the Hippocratic corpus. Plato’s Timaeus offers an account of disease that bears many similarities to Hippocratic accounts as well as to Empedocles’ ‘four roots’ theory of the world (or even to Philistion in the Anonymus Londinensis).
Aristotle
Aristotle
Definition: Aristotle was a philosopher, scientist, and student of Plato. His father was a doctor.
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Problems, History of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, On the Generation of Animals
Significance/theme: Methodologically, he is much closer to modern, empiricalscience. He has an extensive interest in biology of all sorts. He operates on classification (based on observation and assumption). In his biological works, goes into great detail about differences between various different types of animals and even different genders of animals. His focus is on classification and separation of the different types of animals, but this focus can give us interesting medical information. He was an early inspiration for Galen’s idea that you need to be both empiricist and rationalists to be successful. He also studies animals.
Aitiai
Definition: Means “causes.”
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Parts of Animals
Significance/theme: Aristotle is interested in substances and what they cause. His explanation of disease is like “what is the ultimate cause of ‘x’?”
Ousia
Definition: Means “substance.”
Location in texts: Aristotle
Significance/theme: Aristotle was interested in substance and what it causes. For example, what makes a certain animal what it is?
Herophilus
Herophilus (325-255 BCE)
Definition: Herophilus was a Greek physician who practiced in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Herophilus’ Anatomy, On Eyes, On Pulses, Therapeutics
Significance/theme: He is the first anatomist and father of anatomy. He systematically performed many dissections. He was a trans-figure, both rationalist and empiricist. Herophilus was not afraid of breaking previous views. He found a lot of knowledge about the human body. Big contributions include: pulse, veins, eye, and nerves.
Hagnodice
Definition: Herophilus taught her.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: She desired to learn medicine. So she pretended to be a male. Women didn’t trust “him” but then she revealed she was a woman. This showed a culture shift for women, a different world for medical knowledge.
Arachnoeides
Definition: Means “cobweb-like.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was used describing the anatomy of the eye. It shows the extremely detailed dissections that Herophilus would do.
Sphygmos
Definition: Means “pulse.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Shows an impressive level of detail about Herophilus’ works.
Thesis
Definition: Means “down-beat.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Herophilus uses this describing pulse. He says that the dilation of the artery is analogous to the down-beat. Compared it to how musicians have up-beat and down-beat.
Rationalist (dogmatist)
Definition: Herophilus was a rationalist and first established the school.
Location in texts: In Celsus’ Preface
Significance/theme: They believe in a theory of the body, like the four humors, as opposed to empirical school where they observe and give advice based on observation (experience). Galen believes in some hidden cause theory. You can’t literally see the four humors. They attribute the ultimate cause of disease to hidden things.
Divinae manus
Definition: Means “divine hands.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Shows that the use of drugs has been perfected through testing and produce results that are like a divine influence. Shows that drugs are magical things that can treat you and it departs from early Hippocratic medicine.
Gloria
Definition: Means “fame.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes that other men have not attained considerable honor. He shows that your honor or fame builds up your reputation as a doctor. Practice medicine that right way.
Humanitas
Definition: Means “humane quality” or “human kindness.”
Location in texts: Largus’ Compositiones
Significance/theme: Largus writes “All gods and men should hate the doctor whose heart lacks compassion and the spirit of human kindness.” This shows what qualities he believed doctors should have. He relates this to The Oath. Treat all regardless of nationality. This is a distinctly Roman addition to medicine.
Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40-90 CE)
Definition: Roman army physician.
Location in texts: Dioscorides On Medicinal Substances
Significance/theme: Dioscorides is more comprehensive than many of his precursors. Dioscorides attempts a comprehensive compilation of plants, animals, and other medical substances. He travelled around a lot and saw many different herbs, a pharmacist in a sense. He relates to the idea of a valetudinaria, or military hospital. Dioscorides was a good source of information because he knew the plants really well.
Methodism
Methodism
Definition: A dominant medical theory or sect throughout the Roman world for at least three centuries. Methodism has its name because of its claim to follow a uniquely successful method of healing. Founded by Themison.
Location in texts: Celsus, Themison, Thessalus, and Soranus
Significance/theme: Methodism operates on general principles of disease instead of either pure empirical observation or broader theories of the body. These general principles of disease are constriction, looseness, or some combination of the two. Methodism seems to have more of an ad hoc, or pragmatic, feel from the practice of diatritos. Methodists seem to have employed a corpuscular or atomistic theory.
Communia morborum
Definition: Means “general principles of disease” or “commonalities of disease.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This is the general principle of Methodism. Practitioners believe that it is sufficient to observe certain general characteristics of diseases. There are three classes of characteristics: constriction, looseness, and mixture.
Constriction (“genus adstrictum”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Looseness (“genus fluens”)
Definition: Characteristic of Methodism.
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was an explanation of disease.
Soranus of Ephesus (c. 98-138 CE)
Definition: Major figure in Methodism and he is famous for his surviving gynecology. Was the son of a doctor.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology, On Fractures, On Bandages
Significance/theme: Soranus provides us with the most extensive surviving Gynecology from antiquity. He is one of the first to say that virginity is OK, that pregnancy/sex isn’t necessarily the optimal state of health for women. We see a looseness disease, gonorroia, from him. Some parts offer clear cultural stereotypes and biases.
Gonorroia (‘flowing from the genitals’)
Definition: Describes semen.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gonorroia
Significance/theme: The disease is usually chronic and belongs to the “lax” (roôdes) kind.
Hysterikê pnix
Definition: Means “strangulation of the womb.”
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: The disease is of the constricted and violent class and exists both in an acute and chronic form. He writes about what to do in the case of hysterical suffocation.
Sextus Empiricus (c. 160-210 CE)
Definition: A physician and philosopher.
Location in texts: Sextus’ Pyrrhonism
Significance/theme: Sextus Empiricus links Skepticism to Methodism. He is also known for the ten modes of Pyrrhonism. He described how Methodists thinking about medicine is similar to skepticism. He means this idea that Methodists don’t assent to there being hidden causes. They will treat a patient on the fact that these symptoms seem to be there, and this seems to work, but don’t necessarily believe in hidden causes or why they work. Sextus is an example of interweaving of medicine and philosophy in antiquity.
Diatritos
Definition: Means “third day” or every 48 hours. It’s the re-examination every 48 hours.
Location in texts: Soranus
Significance/theme: It is a principle of Methodism. It highlights the ad hoc nature of Methodism. It is mocked by Pliny, who believes it’s a money grab.
Metasynkrisis (‘mixing’)
Definition: The modification of pores of the body
Location in texts: Thessalus
Significance/theme: It was a therapy for chronic (rather than acute) diseases. It states how the body is mixed together is important, and changing that to make more lose or more restricted is part of what you do as a doctor
Satyriasis
Definition: “insatiable sexual desire”; like a Satyr
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: It comes out of their methodology and culture and we see a lot of errors they make are connected to cultural presumptions.
Kata phusin
Definition: Means “according to nature.”
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: First two of Soranus’ books are about this. Books 1 and 2 deal with best midwife, abortion, labor, delivery, cutting umbilical cord, and feeding newborn.
Para phusin
Definition: Means “against nature” or abnormal.
Location in texts: Soranus’ Gynecology
Significance/theme: Last two of Soranus’ books are about this. Book 3 and 4 deal with painful menstruation, the inflammation, hemorrhage, and paralysis of uterus, difficult labor, and retention of placenta.
Humoral Alternatives
Pneumatists (believe in pneuma, ‘breath’)
Definition: They believe in pneuma, or breath, that holds the world together. Hot and cold and wet and dry (active and passive principles).
Location in texts: Athenaeus of Attaleia, Claudius Agathinus, Achigenes of Apamea
Significance/theme: Stood in opposition of Methodist.
Athenaeus of Attaleia (60 BCE? Early Empire?)
Definition: Physician and key pneumatist.
Location in texts: Galen, Pneuma, Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists
Significance/theme: Founder of the Pneumatic school of medicine. Just as the living body has a pneuma, so the world has one, too. Athenaeus explores parallels between the world and the body.
Claudius Agathinus (1st c. CE)
Definition: Key pneumist.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: Wrote on pulsation and fevers. The surviving evidence suggests a significant interest in bathing, particularly cold baths. Cold baths improve complexions, toned the body, and sharpened senses. Warm baths make one flabby, weak, and pale. Particularly good is a cold bath combined with exercise.
Rufus of Ephesus (50-100 CE?)
Definition: Greek Hippocratic doctor that likely studied in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Rufus’ On Gout, On Diseases of the Bladder and Kidneys, On Satyriasis and Gonorrhea, and On Melancholy
Significance/theme: He committed to the four humors, and also the idea that we are not all naturally the same. His works seem to steer clear of the theoretical (which makes sense if he genuinely believes in the radically individual nature of each person). When looking at theories that compete with Methodism we see that Rufus clearly draws upon the legacy of the four humors. Rufus of Ephesus’s work On Melancholy shows an extended treatment of a disease that largely falls into the explanatory patterns we found in works such as Airs, Waters, Places and The Nature of Man
Core of all these alternatives seem to be connected to a re-interpretation of Hippocratic medicine.
Galen
Nicon
Definition: Galen’s father.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Order of My Own Books
Significance/theme: Nicon, in 146 CE, turns Galen to medicine. He dies in 148/9 CE and Galen then travels to Smyrna, Corinth, and Alexandria for study. Galen writes, “; in my seventeenth he was persuaded by clear dreams to make me study medicine at the same time as philosophy.” Galen wants to resemble the virtuous life of his father. He received a vision in the Asclepeion that his son would be a physician.
Glaucon
Definition: Philosopher and friend of Galen.
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Glaucon is keen to test whether Galen can really perform correct diagnoses and prognoses.
Pergamum
Definition: Galen’s hometown.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: In 143 CE Galen begins to attend philosophy lectures in Pergamum. In 157 CE Galen was given public appointment as physician to the gladiators in Pergamum. At Pergamum was a library and an Asclepeion (healing temple).
Rete mirabile
Definition: Means “wondrous net.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Utility of the Parts
Significance/theme: Galen uses this to describe the arteries. He says it is a marvelous network and since it was placed by Nature indicates some great use. Galen thinks this is at the base of the brain and gets it from dissecting a sheep. He was not right about everything; this was a public dissection on animals not humans.
Archê
Definition: Means “source.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Doctrines
Significance/theme: This shows how Galen’s knowledge was based on careful observation. There are three systems; one flows from the brain (muscles), a second from the heart (pulse), and a third from the liver (nutrition). The “proof’ of these systems lies in dissection that shows “flow” from a “source.”
Dunamis
Definition: Means “power” or “potential.”
Location in texts: Galen’s On the Powers of Simple Drugs
Significance/theme: Galen says that “Everything that has some power (dunamis) to alter our nature we call pharmakon, in the same way, I believe, as we also call everything that has some power to increase its substance a foodstuff, and both of these terms are relative in regard to quantity…A dunamis is some active cause, whether in actuality or in prospect.”
Diairesis
Definition: Means “division.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics place heavy emphasis on logical division. It describes the broad analytical process that the physician uses to determine the appropriate treatment for his patient. For example, it may be used to describe the realization that a given symptom or ‘indication’ (endeixis) allows a doctor to know that the disease should be treated with (e.G.) barley gruel rather than another remedy. It is related to the term diorismos, or specification.
Diorismos
Definition: Means “specification” or “clarification.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen therapeutics has emphasis on this. It similarly considers factors relevant to remedies such as age, gender, and size, and it demonstrates one of the ways in which philosophy was significant for Galen’s medical practice. Galen writes, “Specification then allows the doctor to refine and adjust a general rule to see the extent to which it applies in specific cases.”
Endeixis
Definition: Means “indicator” or “symptom.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Part of Galen therapeutics and in order to avoid confusion you follow the indications of the body. They allow a knowledgeable doctor to make the appropriate categorizations and diagnoses.
Duskrasiai
Definition: Means “imbalances” or “bad mixture.”
Location in texts: Galen’s Therapeutics to Glaucon
Significance/theme: Galen says diseases are generally caused by things like imbalances. This shows that he is very similar to a Hippocratic doctor.
Thinning diet (NOT for weight loss…; thinning of humors)
Definition: A method of fixing health.
Location in texts: Galen’s The Thinning Diet
Significance/theme: The Thinning Diet gives us a glimpse into the world of Galen’s dietetics. This treatise seems largely informed by ideas of ‘balance’ and appropriate ‘mixing’ in the humors. It generally recommends strong, pungent foods as ‘thinning.’ This shows the ideas of balance, humor theory, and Hippocratic ideas.
Galen
Significance/theme: We have tons of material from Galen. His “life story” tells us much about his medical practice. His education molded him as a “philosophical” doctor.His experience as a “gladiator” physician gave him ample experience with anatomy and surgery. His experience in Rome demonstrates what a showman he was. He clearly was not afraid to perform and “puff himself up.” He cemented himself as the Hippocratic physician. His teleology shines through in his understanding of anatomy. Galen’s use of drugs is informed by philosophical principles borrowed from Aristotle. Galen was a careful observer. His theory, like all, had strong component in diet and exercise.
The Exercise with the Small Ball
Significance/theme: Gives us insight into Galen’s chief concerns in exercise. He is concerned that exercise involves both the body and the mind; and thinks that the best exercise involves the entire body (arms, legs, etc.) in various ways (vigorous, relaxed, etc.). Variety and balance are good.
Roman Medical Culture
Apuleius of Madauros (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: Roman prose writer.
Location in texts: Apuleius’ Florida and Apology
Significance/theme: Apuleius, in his Apology, shows an extensive knowledge of medicine and philosophy. It shows non-doctors as doctors. He was a sophist and shows that even people who are not doctors do read some technical theories about medicine.
Aidôs
Definition: Means “modesty.”
Location in texts: Galen texts
Significance/theme: Shows how a doctor’s reputation is built. The doctor places great value on the public not observing the patients’ rear or genital region. Makes you trust a doctor in public and private.
Plutarch (c. 46-120 CE)
Definition: Greek historian, biographer, and essayist.
Location in texts: Plutarch’s Lives and How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend)
Significance/theme: Authors such as Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, and Seneca all possess surprisingly extensive medical knowledge. Plutarch attacks the idea of Galen practicing in public.
Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 325-391 CE)
Definition: Roman soldier and historian.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: He shows the legislative efforts to control medicine. He gives us info that at times it seems like you could be put to death for having certain medical magical objects. He shows there are legal restrictions on what medicine can do.
Aelius Aristides (117-181 CE)
Definition: A medical sophist.
Location in texts: Aristides’ Sacred Tales
Significance/theme: He suffered from numerous aliments that he claimed were healed by Asclepius. Although Aristides’ account may be rhetorically embellished, it gives us a clear statement of a personal relationship with Asclepius and some of the ‘cures’ that were undertaken in the name of the god. He tells us that ancient medicine in the second century still existed in parallel to religious medicine, basically has dreams about Asclepius, and pursues a medical regimen that is VERY counter to what Galen would prescribe or suggest (much less scientific).
Augustine of Hippo (345-430 CE)
Definition: Theologian and philosopher in Rome.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: Sets the scene of the parameters of religion at Rome. He gives us evidence about Roman religion and how the Romans had a god for almost everything.
Roman Religion
Cloacina
Definition: Roman goddess of sewers
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
Flora
Definition: Roman goddess of flowers.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God
Significance/theme: This shows that Roman religion manifested a wide variety of forms. Not only was it polytheistic but there were gods of all sorts of things (pleasure, sewers) that we may not expect.
M. Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE)
Definition: Ancient Roman scholar and writer.
Location in texts: Augustine’s City of God, Varro’s Nine Books of Disciplines
Significance/theme: His Nine Books of Disciplines became a model for later encyclopedists, especially Pliny the Elder. Varro decided to focus on identifying nine of these arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine, and architecture. Using Varro’s list, subsequent writers defined the seven classical “liberal arts of the medieval schools”
Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-180 CE)
Definition: A rhetorician and satirist who wrote in Greek language.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: He is skeptic of Asclepius cult. Not all in the Roman world trusted anything associated with Asclepius: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. There are people who are skeptical of Asclepius and people that take advantage of the gullible.
Alexander of Abonoteichus
Definition: A false prophet who hatches a baby snake from a goose egg.
Location in texts: Lucian’s Alexander the False Prophet
Significance/theme: Lucian parodies an individual (Alexander) who takes advantage of others’ belief in the god. Shows there are people who take advantage of those that are gullible and believe in Asclepius cult.
Plato
Plato
Definition: Philosopher in Greece.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus, and Phaedrus
Significance/theme: Shows philosophical medicine. Student of his was Aristotle.
Teleology (the study of ends)
Definition: Means “the study of ends.” There is an end, or goal, that humans are created towards. Things are made in order to do something.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: It is a study that underwrites many of the biological explanations of both Plato and Aristotle. These are explanations that border on the religious, but they can be articulated v. Differently and indeed scientifically. Such explanations have far-reaching consequences for all aspects of medicine and biology. Disease is the reverse of nature and how things should go.
Dêmiourgos
Definition: A demiurge, or being that is responsible for the creation of the universe.
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: In Timaeus Plato says that the world is crafter by a demiurge, or craftsman, who gives order to the world by looking at the external, unchanging “forms.”
Cholê
Definition: Means “bile.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Plato’s mentioning of bile means he was likely exposes to the ideas of humors.
Phaedo
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a dialogue with Socrates.
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: This work shows the idea of teleology. It doesn’t just explain why they are how they are but why they are the best.
Nous
Definition: Means mind
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that it is the mind (nous) that arranges and causes all things and he was pleased with this theory of cause, and it seemed to him to be somehow right that the mind should be the cause of all things.
Beltiston
Definition: Means “what is best.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Phaedo
Significance/theme: Plato says that the mind arranges everything and establishes each thing as it is best for it to be.
Timaeus
Definition: A work by Plato. It is a rhetorical display rather than a typical “dialogue.”
Location in texts: Plato’s Timaeus
Significance/theme: Timaeus gives an account of the origins of the physical world and says it is crafted by dêmiourgos. Timaeus develops a theory of the ‘receptacle’ (hypodochê), a featureless material onto which the craftsman places ‘Formal’ constraints. It is a creation story like we find in Empedocles. The lengthy speech delivered by Timaeus ultimately addresses the topic of diseases of the body and the soul and their remedies. Timaeus’ theories about the origins of disease sound not wholly unlike explanations found in the Hippocratic corpus. Plato’s Timaeus offers an account of disease that bears many similarities to Hippocratic accounts as well as to Empedocles’ ‘four roots’ theory of the world (or even to Philistion in the Anonymus Londinensis).
Aristotle
Aristotle
Definition: Aristotle was a philosopher, scientist, and student of Plato. His father was a doctor.
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Problems, History of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, On the Generation of Animals
Significance/theme: Methodologically, he is much closer to modern, empiricalscience. He has an extensive interest in biology of all sorts. He operates on classification (based on observation and assumption). In his biological works, goes into great detail about differences between various different types of animals and even different genders of animals. His focus is on classification and separation of the different types of animals, but this focus can give us interesting medical information. He was an early inspiration for Galen’s idea that you need to be both empiricist and rationalists to be successful. He also studies animals.
Aitiai
Definition: Means “causes.”
Location in texts: Aristotle’s Parts of Animals
Significance/theme: Aristotle is interested in substances and what they cause. His explanation of disease is like “what is the ultimate cause of ‘x’?”
Ousia
Definition: Means “substance.”
Location in texts: Aristotle
Significance/theme: Aristotle was interested in substance and what it causes. For example, what makes a certain animal what it is?
Herophilus
Herophilus (325-255 BCE)
Definition: Herophilus was a Greek physician who practiced in Alexandria.
Location in texts: Herophilus’ Anatomy, On Eyes, On Pulses, Therapeutics
Significance/theme: He is the first anatomist and father of anatomy. He systematically performed many dissections. He was a trans-figure, both rationalist and empiricist. Herophilus was not afraid of breaking previous views. He found a lot of knowledge about the human body. Big contributions include: pulse, veins, eye, and nerves.
Hagnodice
Definition: Herophilus taught her.
Location in texts:
Significance/theme: She desired to learn medicine. So she pretended to be a male. Women didn’t trust “him” but then she revealed she was a woman. This showed a culture shift for women, a different world for medical knowledge.
Arachnoeides
Definition: Means “cobweb-like.”
Location in texts: Celsus’ On Medicine
Significance/theme: This was used describing the anatomy of the eye. It shows the extremely detailed dissections that Herophilus would do.
Sphygmos
Definition: Means “pulse.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Shows an impressive level of detail about Herophilus’ works.
Thesis
Definition: Means “down-beat.”
Location in texts: Herophilus’ On Pulses
Significance/theme: Herophilus uses this describing pulse. He says that the dilation of the artery is analogous to the down-beat. Compared it to how musicians have up-beat and down-beat.
Rationalist (dogmatist)
Definition: Herophilus was a rationalist and first established the school.
Location in texts: In Celsus’ Preface
Significance/theme: They believe in a theory of the body, like the four humors, as opposed to empirical school where they observe and give advice based on observation (experience). Galen believes in some hidden cause theory. You can’t literally see the four humors. They attribute the ultimate cause of disease to hidden things.