They are full of medical lore—odd ideas and strange practices and treatments. For hemorrhoids, “transfix them with a needle and tie them with a very thick and large woolen thread.” For dysentery, prescribe “a fourth part of a pound of cleaned beans, and twelve shoots of madder.” For watery eyes, “take one drachm of ebony and nine oboli of burnt copper, rub them upon a whetstone, add three oboli of sapphron, triturate all these things till reduced to a fine powder, pour in an Attic hemina of sweet wine, and then place in the sun.” “Persons disposed to jaundice are not very subject to flatulence.” “Eunuchs do not take the gout, nor become bald.” “Persons above forty years of age who are affected with frenzy do not readily recover.” And so on.
Those are oddities. But not all the lore of the Hippocratic writings is odd. Much of it is based on sound observation and practical sense. It is evident, however, even to a nonphysician, that we have come a long way since the fourth century BCE. There is some satisfaction in that discovery. What if it were the other way around—if Hippocrates knew vastly more about medicine than we do?
He did know some things that are sometimes forgotten. He (or those anonymous physicians who may have published under his name) never ceases to emphasize the importance of knowing the past as well as the present of the patient, instead of just his disease—of knowing the whole person, that is, instead of that part of him that is affected by the condition concerning which the physician is a “specialist.” Even a bad diet, Hippocrates says, can be good if one is accustomed to it, which is to say if one has learned to thrive on it. The circumstances of a patient’s life must be known by a physician and will affect the treatment: whether the patient lives in a place where warm winds prevail, or cold ones do; whether the water of his city is brackish or bland. The good physician does not study and treat diseases, but diseased men, women, and children.
Above all, the good physician must strive to do good for his patient. If he cannot do good, then he must strive to do no harm. This famous injunction, which is included in the Hippocratic Oath that all physicians take even today upon entering the medical profession, is never to be forgotten. Remembering it makes a man—be he physician or not—humble in the face of life.
Finally, the third great lesson of Hippocrates is suggested in this distinctive passage:
The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future—must meditate these things and have two special objects in view with regard to diseases, namely, to do good or to do no harm. The art consists in three things—the disease, the patient, and the physician. The physician is the servant of the art, and the patient must combat the disease along with the physician.
The passage has often been commented upon. The great second-century physician Galen, in particular, was struck by two things in it that he considered eminently wise: the injunction not to do harm if the physician could not do good, and the observation that the physician is the servant of his art (or, as some Hippocratic manuscripts have it, the “servant of nature”).
The ancients were of the opinion that of all the arts (we would call them professions), three and only three are “cooperative” —but these three arts are the most important and valuable. By cooperative they meant that the art cannot be practiced without the willing cooperation of someone or something else. In the case of agriculture, that something is nature itself; the good farmer does not fight against nature, he works with it to produce his crops. In teaching, it is the student or pupil who must strive to learn, who cannot be forcibly taught, and in whom the learning takes place. It is the learner who acts in learning; the teacher merely assists the process. Finally, in the case of medicine it is the patient who gets well, not the doctor, and the patient’s cooperation in this endeavor is indispensable; he cannot be cured against his will or unless he contributes actively to the result; nor can he be cured by unnatural (in the sense of anti-natural) endeavors on the part of the physician or anyone else.
In the modern world we often forget this old wisdom, in all three professions. Modern scientific agriculture—or “agribiz,” as it is called—is an offense against nature and its results are predictably bad, if not always disastrous. Many teachers think of themselves as playing the active role in “the learning process” and are surprised when unwilling pupils seem hard to teach. And modern medicine is in danger of becoming “healthbiz,” with regimented cures and automated treatments, as like as not dialed up on a computer.
Computers are useful in medicine; Hippocrates would have welcomed them. But he would have warned of the dangers of overde-pendence on them or on any other instrument or tool. The maintenance of health and the recovery of health from illness are found in the joint efforts of two kinds of wisdom: that of the physician and that of the body itself. The body knows what it has to do and the physician, more than anything else, should not stand in the way.
PLATO
428?–347 BCE
The Republic
The Symposium
The Trial and Death of Socrates
Plato was born in Athens about 428 BCE, the son of aristocratic parents who traced their lineage, on his father’s side, to the god Poseidon, and on his mother’s to the lawgiver Solon. Plato’s early ambitions were political, but the last quarter of the fifth century in Athens was no time for an honest politician, so Plato instead founded a philosophical school, the Academy, which was in many respects the first university (besides philosophy, it taught and underwrote researches in all the sciences, law, and medicine). Plato’s own favorite study was mathematics, and he was closely associated with all of the mathematical discoveries of the fourth century. He had one eventful, and finally dangerous, brush with practical politics. He journeyed twice to Sicily, the leading Greek colony, to try to educate its unruly rulers, but gave up when he realized how little rulers desire to be educated. As to his character and talents, perhaps it is sufficient to quote Aristotle, who declared him to be a man “whom it is blasphemy in the base even to praise.” Plato lived to be about eighty years old. His Academy survived him by more than eight hundred years.
Plato wrote dialogues throughout his life. Most of them have as their main character Socrates, who was Plato’s teacher. Socrates plays many roles in the dialogues of Plato, but he is always the center of the drama as well as being—we must assume—the presenter of Plato’s own views. In his last dialogues (for example, the Laws), Plato discards Socrates and replaces him with an “Athenian Stranger” who is surely Plato himself. This protagonist is nowhere as interesting as Socrates, who enlivens the many dialogues in which he appears with his odd mannerisms and his unique way of discussing philosophy. In a sense, Socrates and Plato, although in fact two different men, are inseparable in our minds. Certainly each of them owes most of his fame to the other.