Summary 2

Lectures on Rationalism,
Philosophy
and Medicine

The Law -- also known in English as the Canon -- is referred to by its Greek title as the Nomos or by its Latin title Lex

Its date is uncertain. Some think that it was written in the Hellenistic period and influenced by the Stoa
and others that it is slightly earlier.
It deals with medical etiquette and teaching

chapter 1
1. Medicine is the medical art (ietrike techne) - Latin: ars medica - that is it is understood as a techne and not like philosophy as an episteme or science. But of all technai it is the most esteemed.
2. Nonetheless quacks and charlatans pretend to be doctors and are unpunished.
   this is perhaps a reference to the fact that doctors were formed a closed guild of Asclepiadae or sons of Asclepius, God of Healing.
   nonetheless people who were not true members could advise the public on healing.
   Like the minor actors in tragedies who have no speaking part, medical assistants could pass themselves off as doctors

   chapter 2

3. the true doctor has to have:
   • the correct physis or apptitude for the subject
   • acquire a learning in this techne,
   • must go to the correct seat of learning to gain it -- this could refer to medical schools at Cos and Cnidus, if not to the Hellenistic schools at Alexandria and Pergamum
   • be brought up in it from childhood -- generally the profession was handed down from father to son or from doctor to adopted son -- outsiders were not admitted
   • hard work -- years of apprenticeship in the guild
   • time (chronos) - was important in medical cures as well
   chapter 3
   
4. learning in medicine compared to horticulture
   • (the physis is the soil
   • the teachers' opinions are the seeds
   • being brought up in the profession from childhood is like the seasonal sowing of seeds
   • the correct seat of learning is like the locality for planting the crop
   • hard work is like tilling the land
   • time is the time taken to grown plants
5. Jones compared this to Diogenes Laertius vii.40 -- a Stoic passage where learning philosophy is compared to farmwork
   he concludes that the Law must then be late
   but the metaphor is general and topical and the Law may derive it from the same source used by the Stoa

   chapter 4
   on attaining knowledge, the doctor travels from city to city as we see from other medical writings

6. he gains experience and without empeiria he is rashful or cowardly
7. the work presupposes that medical experience teaches everything in time.
   chapter 5
8. the work compares medical knowledge to religious revelation - the mysteries -- and to be kept secret and not revealed to laymen
9. other Hippocratic works are in fact written for the layman