The treatise On Ancient Medicine is nowadays one of the most admired, and most studied, of those making up the Corpus Hippocraticum. But this favored position is not a ancient phenomenon, but a modern phenomenon. The treatise contributed to the establishment of the Empiric school of medicine. Empiricists seem to have written commentaries of Hippocratic works. But the attention paid to this work in antiquity was short-lived. In the second century A.D., Galen knew the work, but he did not devote a commentary to it. He almost totally ignored it and his powerful influence made the treatise drop out of sight from later antiquity to early modern times. On Ancient Medicine was not regarded as one of the major works of the Corpus Hippocraticum until in 1939, Emile Littre was a strong advocate of the view that the work was a genuine work of Hippocrates, and placed it first in his ten-volume edition of 1839-1861. Later, some scholars advocated Littre' view, but much more scholars rose against his position. Most of studies of the work motivated by the desire to answer the Hippocratic question reached conclusions that was vague. After all to conclude that Hippocrates was the author of this work would be rash.
*History of Medicine ; History, 19th Century ; History, 20th Century ; History, Ancient ; Literature/*history ; Manuscripts, Medical/*history

The identity of the author's opponents of On Ancient Medicine is an attractive and problematic question. In 1963, Lloyd suggested that the author was attacking Philolaus or medical thinkers influenced by him. In 1998, Vegetty argued that the author's attack was directed at Empedocles himself. But Lloyd's hypothesis need to solve Philolaus' paradox and there is a strong evidence that the author is not criticizing a specific text or thinker at all, but rather a general trend or tendency in the medicine of his time. It is that the author regularly refers to the opponents in the plural(chh. 1, 13, 15, 20). Jouanna in his introduction Bude edition(p. 18) supposes that the author means to say that he has completed his discussion of his initially announced opponents and that he is now launching an independent criticism of philosophical medicine in general, as if there is no essential connection between the two groups. But the distinction between the polemic of chh 1-19 and that of chapter 20 is largely a matter of emphasis. In chh 1-19 the author focuses on the aspect of the opponents' causal reductionism, i.e. reduction of the causes and cures of disease to a few factors. And in chapter 20 he steps back to discuss more general physis theory on which such a position was based. At any rate, We can readily see that initial opponents and the thinkers of chapter 20 at least belong the same intellectual milieu. The answer to the question "Who is attacked in On Ancient Medicine?" is not a specific thinker or different groups, but all those who attempted to reduce the cause of disease to a few factors, and to base their medical practice on a theory of the human physis. An opinion that this work attacked a special thinker involves some of the same pitfalls as the traditional Hippocratic question.
Authorship/*history ; History, 19th Century ; Humans ; Philosophy, Medical/*history

The treatise On Ancient Medicine attests that questions of method were being debated both in medicine and in philosophy and is important evidence of cross-discipline methodological controversy. The treatise On Ancient Medicine is the first attempt in the history of Greek thought to provide a detailed account of the development of a science from a starting point in observation and experience. The author of it criticizes philosophical physicians who attempt to systematized medicine by reducing it to the interaction of one or more of the opposites hot, cold, wet, and dry, factors. He regards the theory of his opponents as hypothesis(hypothesis). Medicine has long been in possession of both an arche and a hodos, a principle and a method, which have enabled it to make discoveries over a long period of time. As far as method is concerned, the traditional science of medicine attained the knowledge of the visible by starting from observation and experience, but it recommended the use of reasoning and analogies with familiar objects as a means of learning about the invisible. It also utilized inference from the visible to the visible(epilogismos) and inference from the visible to the invisible(analogismos). The use of analogy as a means of learning about the obscure was also part of thecommon heritage of early philosophy and medicine. But the author's use of the analogical method distinguishes it from Empedocles' well-known analogy comparisons of the eye to a lantern and the process of respiration to the operations of a clepsydra. According to the author, traditional science of medicine used functional analogy like wine example and cheese example to know the function of humors within the body and utilized structured analogy like a tube example and a cupping instrument example to acknowledge an organ or structure within the body. But the author didn't distinguish between the claim that medicine has a systematic method of making discoveries and very different claim that it has a systematic method of treatment. The reason for this is that he thought that discoveries are the end point of the method of investigation and the starting point of the procedures used in treatment.
Drug Therapy/*history ; Greece ; History, 20th Century ; History, 21st Century ; History, Ancient ; Humans ; Learning ; Medicine, Traditional/*history ; Research/history/trends

In Classical Greece, works defining the nature of art appeared in the various disciplines like medicine, rhetoric, dietetics, architecture and painting. Hippocratic authors tried to show that an art of medicine existed indeed. They contrasted the concept of art with that of chance, not experience that Plato and Aristotle distinguished from art. In fact there are similarities and discrepancies between Hippocratic epistemology and Platoic epistemology. Hippocratic authors maintained that the products of chance were not captured by art. They distinguished the domain of art charactered by explanatory knowledge and prediction from the domain of chance ruled by the unexplained and the unforeseeable. They minimized the role of luck and believed the role of art. Hippocratic authors thought that professional ability contained both knowledge and experience. In Hippocratic corpus, experience is a synonym of competence and usually has a positive meaning. But Plato gave empirical knowledge the disdainful sense and decided a ranking between two types of knowledge. Both Hippocratic authors and Plato held that a genuine art had connection with explanatory knowledge of the nature of its subject matter. A common theme that goes through arguments about art-chance and art-chance is the connection between art and nature. Hippocratic authors and Plato regarded art as a highly systematic process. Art provides us with general and explanatory knowledge of human nature. Art and nature is a mutual relationship. The systematic understanding of nature helps us gain the exactness of art and an exact art helps us understand nature well.
*Art/history ; Greece ; Hippocratic Oath ; History, Ancient ; Humans ; Philosophy, Medical/*history