Greek medical science and its understanding of physis, as conceptualized in the Hippocratic Treatise De Natura Hominis

• Published in: Kagakushi kenkyu. [Journal of the history of science, Japan Vol. 44; no. 233; p. 13
• Main Author: Imai, Masahiro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Japanese
• Published: Japan 2005
• Subjects: Greece, Ancient; History of Medicine; History, Ancient; Humans; Humoralism
• ISSN: 0022-7692

It has often been claimed the Greek medical science has its origin in the rational explanation of the world among the early Greek philosophers that constituted their inquiry into nature. However, there were doctors who made an attempt to establish medical science as existing independently of any philosophical intrusion. This can be elucidated through the analysis of the medical term physis, conceptualized, among others, in the well-known treatise in the Hippocratic Corpus, entitled De Natura Hominis (NH). In NH, the Hippocratic doctor criticizes the philosophical anthropology and medical theory, which hold that human nature comes into being emergently from single elemental stuff such as Air, Water etc, or from a single humor. His own view of human nature claims that the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) constitute the nature (physis) of human body. The human body has its natural powers inherently for preserving health, and, if anything does harm to it, it functions autonomously for restoring its normal condition. In this context, the term physis denotes what determines the normality of the body, in which its humoral constituents remain harmonized with each other. THrough the conception of physis, applied principally to the body, the human body will be demarcated as the physical or material aspect of human nature, as opposed to the monistic view of human nature, which has not drawn a categorical distinction between the material and the non-material.