Hippocrates: Nature of Man [4] 9780674991668, 0674991664 [PDF]

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THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY FOUNDED BY JAMES LOEB,

LL.D.

EDITED BY fT. E. PAGE,

fK CAPPS, '-,.

A.

POST,

l.h.d.

C.H., LITT.D.

fW. H.

ph.d., ix.d.

E. H.

D.

WARMINGTON,

HIPPOCRATES VOL. IV

HERACLEITUS ON THE UNIVERSE

ROUSE,

litt.d.

m.a., f.r.hist.soc.

:,£«.•

^

>,

COS, THE

PLANE TREE.

REPRODUCED FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BV MISS M.HENRV

HIPPOCRATES WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY

W. 8T.

H.

S.

JONES,

Litt.D.

CATHARINE'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

VOL

IV

HERACLEITUS ON THE UNIVERSE

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS MCMLIX

TO

F.

M. R.

First printed 1931 Reprinted 1931, 1943, 1953, 1959

Printed in Great Britain

CONTENTS HIPPOCRATES PAGE

the plane tree

Frontispiece

PREFACE

Vli

INTRODUCTION

jx

NATURE OF MAN

1

REGIMEN IN HEALTH

43

HUMOURS

61

APHORISMS

97

REGIMEN

I

223

REGIMEN

II

297

REGIMEN

III

367

DREAMS

42]

HERACLEITUS ON THE UNIVERSE

449

PREFACE the Loeb translation of of preparing the volume my leisure for over five years, the most laborious part being the collation of the manuscripts Urb. 64, A, M, V, 6, C, Holkhamensis and Caius -|£. I have not quoted all the variants, the perhaps not the greater number of them rule 1 have tried to follow is to record only those readings that are intrinsically interesting and those The readings that seriously affect the meaning. recorded by my predecessors are often wrongly transcribed knowing by experience the risk of mistakes in collations, however carefully done, I am sure that there are some errors in the notes in this volume. The readings of Urb. 64 are here printed for the first time, as also are many from the manuscripts M, V. I wish to thank my pupil, Mr. A. W. Poole, for help in preparing the index.

This

book

Hippocrates. has taken all

completes

The work

;

;

W. H.

S. J.

vn

INTRODUCTION I

INTENTIONAL OBSCURITY WRITINGS

IN

ANCIENT

To a modern it appears somewhat strange that a writer should be intentionally obscure. An author wishes to be easily understood, knowing that neither critics nor readers will tolerate obscurity of any kind. But in ancient times the public taste was different the reader, or hearer, was not always averse to being mystified, and authors tried to satisfy this appetite ;

for puzzles. It was probably

the oracles, with their ambiguous or doubtful replies, that set the fashion, which was followed most closely by those writers who affected an oracular style. The difficulties of Pindar and of the choral odes of Aeschylus,

who was

imitated in

later dramatists, were not entirely or even mainly due to the struggle of lofty thought seeking to find adequate expression in an as yet inadequate this

by

medium. They were to a great extent the result of an effort to create an atmosphere congenial to So Plato, who can religion and religious mystery.

when

his purpose be transparently clear, almost unnatural obscurity when he wishes to attune his readers' mind to truths that transcend human understanding. Much of the Phaedrus and of the Symposium, the Number in the Republic, and a great part of the Timaeus, are oracular affects

it

suits

an

ix

INTRODUCTION utterances rather than reasoned argument, taking their colour from the difficulty of their subject. But prose remained comparatively free from intentional

obscurity ; lyric poetry, on the other hand, at any rate the choral lyric, seems to have been particularly prone to it. In Alexandrine times obscure writing became one of the fads of literary pedants, and Lycophron is a warning example of its folly when carried to extremes.

There must have been something

in

Greek men-

account for the persistence of this curious habit, which appears all the more curious when we remember how fond the Greeks were of clear-cut The reason is probably outlines in all forms of art. to be found in the restless activity of the Greek mind, which never had enough material to occupy The modern has perhaps too much to it fully. think about, but before books and other forms of mental recreation became common men were led tality to

and extravagances. broods, often becoming fanciTo quote but two instances ful, bizarre or morbid. " out of many, the " tradition condemned by Jesus in the Gospels, and the elaborate dogmas expounded at tedious length by the early Fathers, were to some extent at least caused by active brains being deIt is a tribute to the prived of suitable material. genius of the Greeks that they found so much healthy occupation in applying thought to everyday things, thus escaping to a great extent the dangers into

all

sorts of abnormalities

The unoccupied mind

that

come when the mind

is

insufficiently fed.

A

tendency to idle speculation is the only serious fault that can be found with Greek mentality indulgence ;

in intentional obscurity

is

perhaps a

fault,

but only

INTRODUCTION a slight and venial one. As has been said above, oracular responses seem to have started the fashion

of purposely hiding thought, but it was kept up by the Greeks' love of solving puzzles, of having some-

thing really

difficult

with which to exercise their

brains. It has already been pointed out, in the introduction to Decorum, that certain (probably late) tracts in the Corpus are intentionally difficult, but the reason for their difficulties may well be due to a desire to keep secret the ritual or liturgy of a guild Decorum, Precepts and ham are in a class by themselves. This explanation, however, will not apply to the obscure passages in Humours. This work has nothing to do with secret societies. It is a series of notes which, however disjointed or Their obviunconnected, are severely practical. ;

ously utilitarian purpose makes their obscurity all the more difficult to understand a text-book, one ;

might suppose, ought

at

least

when we have made allowances

to

be

clear.

Yet

for

hasty writing and for the natural obscurity of all abbreviated notes, there remains in Humours a large residue of passages in which the difficulties appear to be intentional. The fact that these passages 1 are sometimes written in a rather lofty style seems to Humours is akin, suggest an explanation of them. though not closely so, to Nutriment ; it is aphoristic after the manner of Heracleitus " the dark." This thinker adopted the oracular style when expounding his philosophical system, and certain later thinkers 1

I

seem to detect the characteristics to which I refer Chapter I, and in the various lists of symptoms,

chiefly in etc.

xi

INTRODUCTION followed his example. Perhaps it was thought that a "dark" subject required a "dark" medium of The writer of Nutriment, who was expression. striving to wed Heracleiteanism and physiology,

succeeds in producing a not altogether incongruous result. But Heracleitean obscurity is sadly out of in a work entirely free from philosophy, whether Heracleitean or other, and the modern

place

by it. The ancients, however, have been attracted, for Humours is often referred to, and commentators upon it were numerous. It is interesting to note that the author, or compiler, of Aphorisms, who was a really great reader

is

appear

repelled

to

thinker, while adopting the oracular aphorism as a medium of expression, and keeping

scientific

the lofty style appropriate to it, makes no use of intentional obscurity, realising, consciously or unconsciously, how unsuitable it is in a work intended to instruct medical students and practising physicians.

xil

II

THE FORM AND CONSTRUCTION OF CERTAIN HIPPOCRATIC WORKS Many books in "the Hippocratic Collection are not strictly " books at all they consist of separate pieces written continuously without any internal bond of union. Already, in Volume I, we have discussed the curious features presented by Epidemics I and III,1 and by Airs Waters Places. 2 The aphoristic ;

works, being at best compilations, exhibit a looseness of texture which makes additions and interpolations not only easy to insert but also difficult to detect. Nature of Man and Regimen in Health appear as one work in our MSS., and the whole has been variously divided

by commentators from Galen onwards. Humours has scarcely any texture at all, and the disjointed fragments of which it is composed can in not a few places be traced to other works in the Corpus.

The scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of Nature of Man Humours, probably because of its hopeless obscurity, has been very much neglected seem to make, perhaps unconsciously, a more than doubtful assumption. They suppose the present form of the book to be due to a compiler,

—

—

1

Vol.

I.

pp. 141, 142.

2

Vol.

I. p.

66. xiii

INTRODUCTION who

acted on some definite purpose. It is, however, possible that the "conglomerates," as they be called, are really the result of an accident.

quite

may

A

printed book goes through a fixed routine, which is apt to make us forget that a papyrus roll may well have been a chance collection of unconnected fragments. In the library of the medical school at Cos there were doubtless many rough drafts of essays, lecture notes, fragments from lost works, and quotations written out merely because a reader happened to find them interesting. Some tidy but fact

over-intelligent library-keeper might fasten together enough of these to make a roll of convenient size, giving it a title taken perhaps from the subject of the first, or perhaps from that of the longest Later on, scribes would copy the roll, fragment. and the high honour in which the Hippocratic school was held would give it a dignity to which it was not

not

entitled by

Of

its intrinsic

value.

course these remarks are mere guess-work. Positive evidence to support the hypothesis is very slight, but it should be noticed that a work in the Corpus often ends with a fragment taken from another work. Take, for instance, Regimen in Health. There are seven chapters of good advice The subject is on the preservation of health. treated in an orderly and logical manner, but the reader feels that at the end of the seventh chapter there is an abrupt break in the description For the eighth chapter is of regimen for athletes. a fragment from the beginning of the second book of Diseases, and gives some symptoms of "diseases arising from the brain," and the ninth chapter is a fragment from the beginning of Affections, which xiv

INTRODUCTION insists

on the importance of health and of making recover from illnesses. Here Regimen in

efforts to

Health ends. Several points need careful consideration (1)

and

is

:

—

Regimen in Health proper ends abruptly apparently unfinished ;

This unfinished work has two short fragments tacked on to it, the second of which is but slightly connected, and the first quite unconnected, with the subject matter of the first seven chapters ; (2)

(3) These fragments are taken from the beginnings of other works in the Corpus. Is it possible for such a conglomerate to be the result of design ? What author or editor could be

so stupid as to complete an incomplete work by such unsuitable additions ? What particular kind of accident is responsible nobody could say for certain, but it is at least likely that some librarian, and not an author, added the two fragments. It must be remembered that the parts of a book that get detached most easily, whether the books be a roll or composed of leaves, are the beginning and the end. These places are also the most convenient for making additions. Suppose that the end of Regimen in Health was lost and the beginnings of copies of Diseases II and of Affections became detached surely it is not unreasonable to suppose that a librarian preserved the latter by adding them to the former. Nature of Man is similar in construction, but the fragments added to the main piece are longer Regimen in Health, in fact, is itself one of them. ;

;

xv

INTRODUCTION First we have seven chapters treating of the four humours, which end with the relation between these humours and the four seasons. The eighth x chapter deals with the relation between the seasons and diseases. The ninth chapter 2 begins with the cure of diseases by their opposites. After three sentences a complete break occurs, and a fresh start is made, beginning with ai Se vovcroi yivovrai; and the rest of the chapter, about 50 lines, is concerned with a classification of diseases into (1) those arising from regimen and (2) those caused by the atmosphere. Incidentally it may be noted that the

part of this section is paraphrased in Menon's and attributed to Hippocrates. The tenth chapter briefly postulates a relationship between " of the the virulence of a disease and the "strength Then comes the famous part in which it arises. passage dealing with the veins, which Aristotle in Historia Animalium III. 3 attributes to Poly bus. The twelfth chapter deals with the cause, in the case of patients of thirty-five years or more, of "pus" in The thirteenth chapter consputa, urine or stools. tains two unconnected remarks, the first to the effect that knowing the cause of a disease enables the physician to forecast better its history, the second insisting upon the necessity of the patient's The fourteenth co-operation in effecting a cure. first

Iatrica VII. 15

1

There

is

an unfulfilled promise in ttjv 8e TrepioBov avris which Fredrich would delete as an

j>paaw rwv ij/iepeW, interpolation.

2 This chapter has two references to passages that are not extant, ojairep p-oi Tri^paarai, /ecu irepwBi, and warrep p.oi kcu

It Nature of Man consists of sections taken works now lost, these cross-references are easily

7rdAat e'prjTai.

from

explained.

xvi

INTRODUCTION The last chapter deals with deposits in urine. chapter contains a very brief classification of fevers. It requires a special pleader, biased by a subconscious conviction that a Greek book must be an artistic whole, to maintain that this aggregate follows any logical plan. Yet Fredrich, an excellent scholar and a keen student of Hippocrates, sums up his " Vir opinion in these words quidam, medicus vide:

usum suum

composuit res memoria complures de origine morborum et curatione sententias (77. vcr. avOp. c. ix, 1; ix, 2; 10; 13) dissertationes de venis (c. 11) de pure (12) de urina (14) de febribus (15) de diaeta (1-7) de capitis doloribus (8) principium sanandi (9) et haec quidem duo capita addidit fort., quod initia librorum ei carorum erant." l There is nothing unreasonable in " medicus assigning the collection of extracts to licet, in

dignas

collegit et

:

;

;

"

quidam

;

a physician

is

perhaps as likely a person

But "composuit" does not in the least describe the work of the collector. The sections are not "arranged"; if any effort was made to put them in order it was a very unsuccessful effort. It is a far more likely hypothesis to suppose that fragments of papyrus were fastened together by someone, perhaps a physician, perhaps a library as a librarian.

attendant, to prevent their getting lost. A similar problem faces us when we

examine

Humours, but here the disiccta membra are even more incongruous and disordered. An analysis of the work may prove useful.

Chapter

I.

The humours, and how to them when abnormal.

divert or

deal with 1

C. Fredrich, de libro

irepl vffws

avOpdirov pseudippocrateo,

p. 15.

xvii

INTRODUCTION A mass of detail the physician Chapters II-IV. should notice when examining a patient. Chapter V. How to find the Kcn-ao-rao-is of a disease. What should be averted and what encouraged.

Chapter VI. The proper treatment at paroxysms and crises. Various rules about evacuations. Chapter VII. Abscessions. Chapter VIII. Humours and constitutions generally

;

their relation to diseases.

Psychic symptoms and the relation between mind and body. Chapter X. External remedies. Chapter XI. The analogy between animals and

Chapter IX.

plants.

The

Chapter XII.

fashion of diseases, which are due to districts, climate, etc. Chapters XIII-XVIII. Seasons, winds, rains, etc., and their influence on health and disease. Chapter XIX. Complexions. congenital, or

Chapter XX.

Quotation from Epidemics VI.

23, dealing chiefly with abscessions

and

3,

fluxes.

There are many quotations or paraphrases from various Hippocratic treatises. Chapter Chapter Chapter 22; Chapter

III.

IV. VI.

Aph. IV. 20; Prognostic II. Prorrhetic 39 Joints 53.

I.

;

Aph. I. 19; 20; Epi. I. 6; Aph. I. 21; 23; 24. VII. Aph. IV. 31; Epi. VI. 7, 7; Aph.

IV. 32 Epi. VI. 1,9; IV. 48 Aph. IV. 33 Epi. IV. 27 and 50; Epi. VI. 1, 9 ; 3, 8; 7' 1 7, 7 7, 7. 5, 9 Chapter X. Epi. II. 1, 7 Epi. IV. 61. ;

;

;

;

;

xviii

;

;

INTRODUCTION Chapter XII. 7

and

Chapter XIII. Epi.

4

III.

Aph.

Airs, Waters, Places 9,

;

9.

II.

Epi.

1,

5;

Aph.

Chapter XIV. /fp£. III. 5, 21 and Chapter XV. Aph. III. 1. Chapter XX. Epi. VI. 3, 23, to 4,

words

other

In

quoted

:

—

III.

8;

6;

4.

I.

the

following

5.

3.

passages

are

Aph. I. 19 20 21 22 23 24. Aph. III. 1; 4; 5; 6; 8; 21. 32 33. Aph. IV. 20 31 ;

;

;

;

I.

Epi.

;

;

;

;

4.

1,5; 1, 6; 1,7; 5, 9. 27; 48; 50; 61. 3, 23 to 4, Epi. VI. 1,9; 3, 8 II.

£jji.

Epi. IV.

;

3.

7. Epi. VII. 1 Prognostic II. I. Prorrhetic 39. ;

Joints 53. ^irs, Waters, Places 7

In

all

and

9.

there are thirty-five borrowed passages.

The

analysis

means adequate

of ;

Humours given above

a careful

omissions of details.

It

is,

is

reader will note

by no

many

in fact, impossible to

analyse what is itself in many places an analysis. Some parts of the book read just like lecture notes, or heads of discourse to be expanded orally by a teacher or lecturer. It is indeed hard to believe that the lists in Chapters II, III, IV, V, IX are not either such notes or else memoranda made by a student for his own guidance. How and why the xix

INTRODUCTION other parts were added it is impossible to say, with the possible exception of the first chapter and the As has already been said, the beginning and last. end of an ancient scrap-book are the places where additions are most easily made. The first chapter, while similar in character to the rest of the book, is separated from it by the words aKCTrrea ravra; with which the second chapter begins. These words may well have been the title, as it were, of the memoranda which we assume form the basis of the whole work. The last chapter is obviously a fragment added to the end of the roll by somebody who did not wish it to be lost. Neither Humours nor Nature of Man must be judged by the canons used in appreciating literature. They are not literary compositions, and only the first chapters of Nature of Man are artistically written. Humours is not only inartistic but also often ungrammatical. The writer, or writers, wrote down rough notes without thinking of syntactical

Not intended for publication, these jotshow us that the Greek writers were some-

structure.

tings

times inaccurate or inelegant in speech. The textual critic, deprived of one of his most powerful weapons, that a faulty expression is probably due to the carelessness of a scribe, is forced to pause and think. If the scientists were often slipshod, perhaps the

A linguistic literary writers were occasionally so. error in the text of, say, Demosthenes may be due, not to the mistake of a scribe, but to the

inaccuracy of Demosthenes himself. Even the greatest artists are not infallible. In conclusion, it should be remembered that a papyrus roll could contain no foot-notes, and that

xx

INTRODUCTION marginal notes did not come into general use before the age of the scholiasts. No author annotated his own works he worked any necessary annotations into the text itself, and these might consist of illustrative As one reads Humours passages from other works. the conviction grows that many of its apparently irrelevant passages are really notes of this type. ;

A

The example occurs in Chapter XIV. the influence of south winds and of north winds on health, and the author concludes his remarks at fxaWov. Some note, however, is required, good

subject

is

to deal with a special case. This special case brings in (1) the question of droughts and (2) the humours.

So two fresh notes are added, one stating that either wind may accompany drought, and the other that humours vary with season and district. Between the two notes is inserted a remark (Siac^epet yap kol raAAa ovTw fJ-tya. yap nal tovto), the connection of which is very obscure. It may refer to the effects of winds (as in the translation), or it may mean that other things beside winds influence the character of diseases. So there are apparently four notes, one at least of which is a note added to the first note. But this explanation of irrelevant passages must not be pushed too far. It cannot account for the of many amorphous construction Hippocratic treatises, which is almost certainly due to the welding together of detached or separate fragments of various sizes in order to preserve them in book form.

xxi

Ill

SCIENCE AND IMAGINATION The

progress of scientific thought depends upon One is the collection of facts by observation and experiment the other is constructive imagination, which frames hypotheses to interThe Greek genius, alert and pret these facts. vigorous, was always ready with explanations, but it was too impatient, perhaps because of its very quickness, to collect an adequate amount of evidence This fault for the framing of useful hypotheses. was not altogether a bad thing ; the constructive imagination needs to be developed by practice if

two

factors.

;

But imagination needs progress is to be possible. also training and education, and the Greek mind was so exuberant that it shirked this necessary

The drudgery of collecting facts, and of making sure that they square with theory, proved too laborious. Experiment was entirely, or almost The hypotheses of early Greek entirely, neglected.

discipline.

thought are mere guesses, brilliant guesses no doubt, but related to the facts of experience only in the

most casual way. Medicine, indeed, did usually insist on the collection and classification of phenomena, but guesses mar all but the very best work in the Hippocratic Corpus, and it was not until Aristotle xxii

INTRODUCTION and Theophrastus

laid the foundations of biology that the importance of collecting sufficient evidence

was

fully realised.

connection to note that the arts were distinguished from the sciences only It is interesting in this

zenith. The word or "science/' though towards the former, sometimes in a

when Greek thought was past can mean either "art"

riyyv) it

inclines

more

its

slightly derogatory sense

("knack"). 2o