Ancient Greek Doctors: A historical reconstruction based on the Hippocratic Corpus

• Main Authors: LI-ChuanKuo, 郭莉娟
• Other Authors: Jia Sheng Ueng
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/99131938061927897581

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 歷史學系碩博士班 === 99 === This thesis is to use Greek polis as the context for an inquiry, based on the Hippocratic Corpus, into the image of Greek doctor and his healing practice, in order to establish a more realistic and comprehensive picture of ancient Greek doctor in general. This attempt to re-contextualize Greek doctor will be approached from four perspectives: the image of doctor as medical technician, his interpretation of disease, his oath as well as his view of life and death conditioning his medical practice. Ancient Greek healing market was full of competing views on healings and allowed various kinds of practices, and the Greek doctors, inter alias, had to compete and establish their own authorities to justify their medical healing as a worthy techne and their status as medical “technician”. Accordingly, the Corpus tells us that Greek doctors developed their own way of medical practice, fortified with risk-prevention mechanism, that helped them pass plausible judgments on symptoms and avoid cases that would end in failures in treatment and bring ruin to their reputation. In his healing practice a Greek doctor developed an interpretative strategy of diseases in terms of ordinary language. He would use a widely shared knowledge of humoral balance and its lack to help his patient understand the diseases he suffered and the impacts exerted on his life. Such an interpretative system throws light on why the Greek doctors were not concerned so much with the effect of healing as the procedure of healing. Through such an interpretation a doctor would became an intermediary between the disease and the patient in question. This would reduce drastically the moral blame that came with the lack of efficacy the Greek medicine in general would bring about. Furthermore, the famous Hippocratic Oath under this light would then be reinterpreted as a code of practice for the guild of doctors that regulated and informed the Asclepiadai. The Oath should, in addition, not be taken as a trans-historical document that embodied permanent values. It is ancient and Greek. If a Greek doctor seems less an interventionist in his treatment, it might be because he was further conditioned by the Greek view on life and death. For the Greeks soul (psyche) is a “self-moving” principle, a principle of life that could take different degrees in terms of scala naturae. Death, by contrast, is a minimal version of this principle, a very tenuous form of life, and so in the Hades the dead maintained a certain degree of existence that could be revived temporally by sacrificial blood. What constitutes life and death seems like two vectors of a continuum that has to be marked arbitrarily by the ritual of funeral. This less drastic view of death might prompt a Greek doctor whose resources were limited and a patient who shared this popular view of death not to push medicine to its limit. This explains why a Greek doctor often suggested a benign regimen or a moderate change of habits as a way of healing so that the patient could face up calmly the disease he suffered or even the last minutes of his life.