Although the Greeks created rational medicine, their work was not always or even fully scientific in the modern sense of the term. Like other Greek pioneers of science, the doctors were prone to think that much more could be discovered by mere reflection and argument than by practice and experiment. For in their time there was not yet a distinction between philosophy and science, including medicine. Hippocrates was the first to separate medicine from philosophy and disprove the idea that disease was a punishment for sin. Much of the traditional treatment for injuries and ailments practiced by the Greeks stemmed from folk medicine, a characteristic shared by the Greeks with other societies to this day.

Folk medicine uses the knowledge of herbs and accessible drugs, which humans have collected piece by piece through the ages to cure everything from toothaches to infertility. Stray references in Greek literature give us a better understanding of folk medicine and magic in Greek society. In Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes, the hero Philoctetes treats a snakebite on his foot using an unspecified herb as a palliative. Elsewhere, the practice of singing incantations over wounds is mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, wounded in his youth at a boar hunt, is said to have been skillfully bandaged by the sons of Autolycus, who stopped the bleeding with incantations (Odyssey XIX, 455-458).

Red Figure, Attic Vase, 490 BCE Philoctetes bitten by a snake on Lemnos While en route to Troy with the Greek army, the hero Philocteteswas bitten by a snake as he participated in a sacrifice to a minor deity named Chrse. The wound produced by the snakebite was so malodorous and caused Philoctetes to utter such inauspicious cries that his comrades marooned him on the island of Lemnos for the duration of the war. Philoctetes treated his wound with unspecified herbs until he was finally rescued from Lemnos and cured by the military doctors at Troy.

One of Hippocrates’ predecessors was Alcmaeon of Croton who operated on the eye and discovered ‘passages’ linking the sense organs to the brain, which he recognized as the seat of thought and feeling (followed by Plato but not Aristotle). Alcmaeon was probably the first physician to formulate the doctrine of health as a balance among the powers of the body, these powers being constituent fluids with definite qualities and causal properties.

Fragment of a grave stele, Ionian, 5th century BCE: East Greek Tombstone of a Doctor This tombstone is identifable as belonging to a doctor by the two small cupping vessels which appear at the top of the stele. Because the marker is damaged, we cannot know whether the figure standing at right was a patient or assistant.

Health was isonome, “equality before the law”, among these fluids, and illness monarche, the dominance of one of them. This conception was taken from the observed struggle of factions in politics. Among the many qualities that needed to be held in balance were heat and cold, moisture and dryness, bitterness and sweetness. This doctrine was later parlayed by Hippocrates into the Theory of the Four Humors, which provided the basis for medical theory up until the time of the American Revolution. The philosophers/physicians Empedocles and Anaxagoras were contemporaries of Alcmaeon. Like other scientists of their day, they inquired about such quasi-medical topics as the composition of matter (is the primary element earth, fire or water?), the seat of the human soul (some believed it to be the heart, some the liver and still others the diaphragm), and the procreative process of humans (most held that the male sperm was exclusively responsible for conception). Modern scientists have grappled with these same problems with only slightly more success than did the Greeks. We know that atoms constitute matter and that atoms are further divided into protons, and protons into quarks; but what smaller constituents await discovery? The fact that 2,500 years later we are still asking some of the same questions posed by the Greeks brings to mind the phrase nihil sub sole novi, that is, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl.i.9). For every question we may posit, the Greeks have surely asked and answered it.

A cursory survey of medical thought and practice throughout antiquity makes apparent two underlying themes. Throughout antiquity and into the Middle Ages there was a nexus between medicine and philosophy. Scientists in the ancient world often were philosophers as well as physicians and the distinction between the two fields was often blurred. At its inception in the sixth century BCE, ancient medicine was a mere branch of natural philosophy. Even in Late Antiquity, when the philosopher/physician Galen reigned supreme, philosophy was considered a necessary part of medical training. Unlike philosophy and medicine, which worked in harmony, the tension between medicine and religious belief often stifled or impeded physiological research. Throughout antiquity, rational medicine and faith healing existed side by side, never fully divorcing themselves from one another Roman medicine especially was an eclectic blend of rational Hellenistic medicine, folk remedies and religious cult practice. Like so many other aspects of antiquity, medicine was truly interdisciplinary, influencing and in turn being influenced by art, literature, philosophy, politics and in no small way, religion.

Rembrandt van Rijn, 1653 Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer The importance of Aristotle to Western intellectual life--even 2,000 years after his death--is honored in this painting, in which great philospher-scientist also acknowledges his debt to Homer.