“Although up to now the [visual] image has been [understood as] a construct of reason,” Kepler observes in the fifth chapter of his Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena, “henceforth the [visible] representations of objects should be considered as paintings [ picturae ] that are actual[ly projected] on paper or some other screen.” While not intended as a historical generalization, this claim nonetheless reflects historical reality. Virtually all visual theorists before Kepler did, in fact, conceive of optical images as subjective, not objective constructs (...) – or, to put it in modern terms, as virtual rather than real entities. By current lights, of course, the distinction between virtual and real images is both obvious and common-place: whereas the latter can be physically projected upon a screen, the former cannot. (shrink)

The five books of Artemidorus of Ephesus’ Oneirocritica (c. second century CE) constitute the largest collection of divinatory dream-interpretations to survive from Graeco-Roman antiquity. This article examines Artemidorus’ contribution to longstanding medico-philosophical debates over the ontological and epistemic character of such dreams. As with wider Mediterranean traditions concerning premonitory dreams, Greeks and Romans popularly understood them as phenomena with origins exterior to the dreamer (e.g. a visitation of a god). Presocratic and Hippocratic thinkers, however, initiated an effort to bring at (...) least some dream events within the body as interior processes of a physical soul, a bodily turn which ultimately engendered a split in thinking about the possibility and scope of prophetic and diagnostic dreams (e.g. Hippocrates Regimen 4, Aristotle On Prophecy in Dreams, Rufus of Ephesus, and Galen). Here, I examine the way that Artemidorus meant the Oneirocritica to address seriously questions about the origins of dreams and the powers of empirical science in two, related ways. We will see that his defense of oneirocriticism as a techne unfolds along two main axes. First, Artemidorus constructs a necessary veneer of scientific credibility by mobilizing the tropes and organizational strategies characteristic of contemporary technical literature. Secondly, he anchors that authority upon a materialist account of prophetic dreams as “semiotic movements of the soul.” As Price, S. 1986. “The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus.” Past & Present 113: 3–36 and Harris-McCoy, D. 2012. Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press observed, this explicit commitment to an empirical method of dream-interpretation resembles that of the Hellenistic medical ‘sect’ known as ‘Empiricists,’ who eschewed interest in theoretical etiology in favor of observation, comparison, and compilation of symptoms and outcomes. Pushing beyond similarity, I argue that Artemidorus not only deployed this method to defend empirically grounded accounts of dream-divination (cf. Cicero De div. 1), but endeavored to show that such a scientific method can be used to stabilize and corral productively the potentially infinite number of interpretations any dream-sign might bear without recourse to an underlying, causal theory. (shrink)

Ancient medical practitioners discussed and debated whether previously unknown kinds of disease had been discovered and whether new diseases could come into existence. The debate over new diseases was of fundamental importance in defining the medical sects which came to dominate elite medicine from the Hellenistic period. This paper offers an overview of the most significant Greek and Roman sources for the debate over new diseases and an account of the origins and significance of this debate.

Past anatomical dissection practice has received recent attention in the humanities and social science literature, especially in a number of popular format books. In these works, past ethically dubious dissection practices are again revisited, including stealing the dead for dissection. There are extremely simple, yet very important, lessons to be had in these analyses, including: do not exploit the dead and treat the dead with dignity, respect, and reverence. In this paper, we highlight that these principles apply not just to (...) anatomists but to all parties concerned with bodies for dissection, including journalists and authors from the humanities writing on anatomical dissection whether in the historical or modern-day context. Not too infrequently these same authors/publishers resort to sensationalist language in titles, text, and/or promotion blurbs in a bid to grab attention and sell books. These actions, yet again, exploit dissection subjects for commercial purposes. The use of insensitive and sensationalist language that is designed to shock, fails to set good precedent for young impressionable students and paints an entirely backward picture of modern-day anatomy for intending or existing donors and their families. We suggest that all who participate in anatomical endeavours should strive to do so with reverence toward the dead, including armchair journalists and humanities authors who, just like their hands-on anatomical colleagues, should employ dignified, sensitive, and respectful language that is not sensationalist. (shrink)

Last year saw the 20th anniversary edition of JECP, and in the introduction to the philosophy section of that landmark edition, we posed the question: apart from ethics, what is the role of philosophy ‘at the bedside’? The purpose of this question was not to downplay the significance of ethics to clinical practice. Rather, we raised it as part of a broader argument to the effect that ethical questions – about what we should do in any given situation – are (...) embedded within whole understandings of the situation, inseparable from our beliefs about what is the case, what it is that we feel we can claim to know, as well as the meaning we ascribe to different aspects of the situation or to our perception of it. Philosophy concerns fundamental questions: it is a discipline requiring us to examine the underlying assumptions we bring with us to our thinking about practical problems. Traditional academic philosophers divide their discipline into distinct areas that typically include logic: questions about meaning, truth and validity; ontology: questions about the nature of reality, what exists; epistemology: concerning knowledge; and ethics: how we should live and practice, the nature of value. Any credible attempt to analyse clinical reasoning will require us to think carefully about these types of question and the relationships between them, as they influence our thinking about specific situations and problems. So, the answers to the question we posed, about the role of philosophy at the bedside, are numerous and diverse, and that diversity is illustrated in the contributions to this thematic edition. (shrink)

An oft-cited truism about the emergence of a new, ‘mechanistic’ approach to natural philosophy in the seventeenth century is that it was inspired by analogy to the workings of clockwork. In Authori...

In this paper I outline a role for mechanistic conceptions of organisms in ancient Greek natural philosophy, especially the study of organisms. By ‘mechanistic conceptions’ I mean the use of ideas and techniques drawn from the field of mechanics to investigate the natural world. ‘Mechanistic conceptions’ of organisms in ancient Greek philosophy, then, are those that draw on the ancient understanding of the field called ‘mechanics’ — hê mêchanikê technê—to investigate living things, rather than those bearing some perceived similarity to (...) modern notions of ‘the mechanical.’ I have argued elsewhere that evidence of mechanistic conceptions of the natural world can be found, not only among seventeenth and eighteenth century ‘mechanical philosophers,’ but also—albeit in vestigial form — in some ancient Greek texts. Unfortunately, these reports are slight, often by detractors of this approach, and offer only clues as to the motivational context for employing these mechanical conceptions. Here, my purpose is to suggest what role they might have played in the history of natural philosophy. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 61, Issue 1, pp 82 - 109 Galen talks about tension, _tonos_, in a physiological sense, which seems to be related to either the innate heat of the living being, the good mixture of its humors, or the body’s _pneuma_. This paper shows that Galen, with some important distinctions concerning the substance of the soul, derives this use of _tonos_ from the Stoics. But beyond that, it shows that Galen uses _tonos_ in a strict psychological sense derived (...) from Plato as well, and integrates it in his characterization of the operations of the spirited part of the soul. (shrink)

Starting from the works by Aselli on the milky veins and Harvey on the motion of the heart and the circulation of the blood, the practice of vivisection witnessed a resurgence in the early modern period. I discuss some of the most notable cases in the century spanning from Aselli’s work to the investigations of fluid pressure in plants and animals by Stephen Hales. Key figures in my study include Johannes Walaeus, Jean Pecquet, Marcello Malpighi, Reinier de Graaf, Richard Lower, (...) Anton Nuck, and Anton de Heide. Although vivisection dates from antiquity, early modern experimenters expanded the range of practices and epistemic motivations associated with it, displaying considerable technical skills and methodological awareness about the problems associated with the animals being alive and the issue of generalizing results to humans. Many practitioners expressed great discomfort at the suffering of the animals; however, many remained convinced that their investigations were not only indispensable from an epistemic standpoint but also had potential medical applications. Early modern vivisection experiments were both extensive and sophisticated and cannot be ignored in the literature of early modern experimentation or of experimentation on living organisms across time. (shrink)

Contrary to the common view, this paper suggests that the Hippocratic oath does not directly refer to the controversial subjects of euthanasia and abortion. We interpret the oath in the context of establishing trust in medicine through departure from Pantagruelism. Pantagruelism is coined after Rabelais' classic novel Gargantua and Pantagruel. His satire about a wonder herb, Pantagruelion, is actually a sophisticated model of anti-medicine in which absence of independent moral values and of properly conducted research fashion a flagrant over-medicalization of (...) human problems. Ultimately this undermines the therapeutic core of medicine itself. We contend that PAS is a case of such over-medicalization and that its institution creates medicophobia. This article does not express an opinion about euthanasia in general. Rather, we claim that physicians should learn from the oath and from Rabelais that they should keep their practice to medical care and not to exploit their expertise and social privileges for the sake of ulterior motives, even when their patients desire those goals. (shrink)

ArgumentThe sect of ancient Greek physicians who believed that medical knowledge came from personal experience also read the Hippocratic Corpus intensively. While previous scholarship has concentrated on the contributions of individual physicians to ancient scholarship on Hippocrates, this article seeks to identify those characteristics of Empiricist reading methodology that drove an entire medical community to credit Hippocrates with medical authority. To explain why these physicians appealed to Hippocrates’ authority, I deploy surviving testimonia and fragments to describe the skills, practices, and (...) ideologies of the reading community of ancient Empiricist physicians over the one-hundred year period 175 to 75 BCE. The Empiricist conception of testimony taken on trust operative within that reading community elided the modern distinction between personal and institutional targets of trust by treating Hippocratic writings as revelatory of the moral character of Hippocrates as an author. Hippocrates’ moral character as an honest witness who accurately observed empirical phenomena aligned with the epistemic virtues of an empirical medical community who believed that medical knowledge came from personal experience. So I argue that Empiricist reading culture constructed a moral authority of honesty and accuracy from Hippocratic writings, enlarged the personal authority of Hippocrates among medical readers, and contributed to the development of Hippocratism. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Alexandrian physicians Erasistratus of Iulis and Herophilus of Chalcedon adopted an Aristotelian analysis of the composition of organic bodies into three levels, namely elements, uniform and non-uniform parts. They asserted that it was not the task of the doctor to analyse the body at the level of elements, that the uniform parts, being perceptible, should be taken to be most basic in the context of medicine and that the inquiry into the elements be left to (...) philosophers. The paper explores the possible motivations behind this restriction, and considers more generally its connections to the Peripatetic background. (shrink)

This paper compares the cases of female ailments recorded in the Epidaurian Miracles Cures with the theory and therapeutics of the Hippocratic gynecological texts as a means of testing the extent of the assumptions shared between temple and Hippocratic medicine. I argue that where temple and Hippocratic practice hold common ground, it is readily explicable through widely circulating and historically rooted cultural presuppositions regarding female physiology and pathology, rather than through scientific borrowings. Rather than representing complementary outlets of medical care (...) in which Asklepios specialized in “hopeless” cases, I suggest that the iamata permit us to observe a process in which parallel medical traditions branched out from a common cultural substratum, and that more nuance is required in framing the relationship between Greek naturalist and religious medicine. (shrink)

The physician Herophilus of Chalcedon, who lived and worked in Alexandria in the early third centuryb.c., is best known and justly celebrated for his numerous and ground-breaking anatomical discoveries and advances in such areas as pulse theory. His systematic investigations into the human body led to some of the highest achievements of Hellenistic science, among which the best known is probably his discovery and detailed description of the nervous system and its functions. Yet certain aspects of his thought have seemed (...) difficult to harmonize with the aims and methods of his medical research. One such is his attitude to causality. According to Galen, Herophilus had accepted the existence of causes merely on a hypothetical basis, and indeed had made the striking claim that ‘by nature it is not discoverable whether causes do or do not exist’. Galen associates these views directly with a number of arguments designed to prove that there are no such things as causes, but we are otherwise left with little in the way of context, and different interpretations have unsurprisingly suggested themselves. (shrink)

Galen is criticized for combining Plato’s tripartition-cum-trilocation of the soul, in which each part constitutes its own source of motivation, with the demand that the faculty of voluntary motion is limited to the rational part, being the only one located in the brain and having access to the relevant nerves. While scholars have concentrated on small nerves as connective organs, this paper focuses on thepneuma, blood and innate heat. When the latter is increased, the irrational parts can affect the brain’s (...) function to such an extent that the rational part’s volitions are reduced to their own desires. (shrink)

The paper examines the conception of health of the Graeco-Roman medical and philosophical author Galen. On the basis of a range of texts, especially Matters of Health and Thrasybulus, the most significant and influential characteristics of this conception are considered: the twofold definition of health in terms of balance of elements and of organic function; the notion of a latitude within health; the extent to which health is conceived as a specialist expertise, and against this the possible role of the (...) patient in understanding his/her own health. Galen's health writings are also considered in their social-historical context and in relation to their intellectual predecessors – Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle and a range.. (shrink)

The most striking advances in the knowledge of human anatomy and physiology that the world had ever known—or was to know until the seventeenth century A.D.—took place in Hellenistic Alexandria. The city was founded in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great. After the tatter's death in 323 B.C. and the subsequent dissolution of his empire, it became the capital of one of his generals, Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who established the Ptolemaic dynasty there. The first Ptolemy, subsequently named Soter , (...) and his son Ptolemy Philadelphus , became immensely enriched by their exploitation of Egypt and raised the city to a position of great wealth and magnificence. Anxious to enhance both their own reputation and the prestige of the kingdom, they sought to rival the cultural and scientific achievements not only of other Hellenistic rulers but even of Athens herself. Their patronage of the arts and sciences, coupled with their establishment of the Museum , together with the Library, made the city the centre of Hellenistic culture. Philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, artists, poets and physicians were all encouraged to come and work there. (shrink)