Hippocratic Corpus
Natural vs. divine causality

Whatever their disagreements, the Hippocratic writers agree in rejecting divine and religious causes and remedies of disease in favor of natural mechanisms. Hippocratic medicine had been formulated to hold true to the belief that "medicine should be practiced as a scientific discipline based on the natural sciences, diagnosing and preventing disease as well as treating them." This not only influenced the relevance of heaven in medicine, and the church's influence on the practice of medicine, but also the relevance of astronomy and cosmology in medicine as a science. Greek tragedy encouraged the spread of false knowledge about the divine origin of human diseases. Greek gods were placed on a pedestal, and seen as healers as a result. To combat this view of diseases, Hippocratic physicians restricted their diagnoses to rational causes and rejected anthropomorphic intervention as the cause and solution of medical issues. In addition to Greek poetry and tragedy, magicians, charlatans, and purifiers can also be considered responsible for the widespread of 'sacred' explanations. Doing this allowed them to step in and provide inefficacious remedies that could convince the gods to intervene and fix these sacred issues experienced by individuals. Thus On the Sacred Disease considers that epilepsy (the so-called "sacred" disease) "has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men's inexperience and to their wonder at its peculiar character." An exception to this rule is found in Dreams (Regime IV), in which prayers to the gods are prescribed alongside more typically Hippocratic interventions. Though materialistic determinism goes back in Greek thought at least to Leucippus, "One of the greatest virtues of the physicians of the Hippocratic Collection is to have stated, in its most universal form, what was later to be called the principle of determinism. All that occurs has a cause. It is in the treatise of The Art that the most theoretical statement of this principle is to be found: 'Indeed, under a close examination spontaneity disappears; for everything that occurs will be found to do so through something.'" In a famous passage of On Ancient Medicine, the author insists on the importance of knowledge of causal explanations: "It is not sufficient to learn simply that cheese is a bad food, as it gives a pain to one who eats a surfeit of it; we must know what the pain is, the reasons for it, and which constituent of man is harmfully affected."
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