Towards a Hippocratic Anthropology: On Ancient Medicine and the Origins of Humans.

Abstract

The Hippocratic On Ancient Medicine (VM) is one of the earliest treatises in the corpus and, as such, offers a valuable glimpse at an otherwise poorly documented period of intellectual history. What makes this text so intriguing is that, on the one hand, it sits comfortably within the familiar philosophical and scientific debates of late fifth-century Greece, but, on the other, offers what seem to be idiosyncratic approaches to them. At its most fundamental level, On Ancient Medicine offers a polemic against speculative philosophy that relies on ‘newfangled hypothesis’1 (καινὴ ὑπόθεσις at 1.3) to account for disease and formulate treatment, and argues for a method that instead combines empirical research and analogical reasoning. What is distinct about the work, however, is the author’s focus on food and dietary regimen as the foundation of medical τέχνη and the steps in his thinking that lead him to this position. To reach this conclusion, the author deploys in a famous section of the work (ch. 3) his own form of hypothesizing about the condition of the human species in an imagined prehistorical state of primitivity. That chapter is, in part, a self-promotional argument for the antiquity and validity of medicine as a τέχνη, but it also deserves a place, as many have observed, alongside other works of the period that took an interest in what we would call cultural anthropology. It would serve the theme of this volume well if I could argue that On Ancient Medicine’s particular foray into cultural anthropology was distinctly ‘Hippocratic’, and that any ancient doctor aligning himself with Hippocratic medicine would have been familiar with, and sympathetic to, On Ancient Medicine’s anthropological explanation of the origins of medicine. In fact, however, the available evidence does not allow us to say much