Sublime

The teachings of antiquity,

the mind was influenced by the body, the doctor had a part to play in teaching virtue.

‘our natures are the physicians of our diseases’,

Sickness was not fundamentally and qualitatively different from health; rather sickness set in when normal functions went awry.

The true doctor would no longer be an intermediary with the gods but the bedside friend of the sick.

Nature was benign and, if only people heeded her laws, bodies would naturally be well.

Medicine has offered the promise of ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’, but not always on terms palatable to and compatible with cherished ideals.

‘The art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician,’ wrote Hippocrates,

The idea of probing into bodies, living and dead (and especially human bodies) with a view to improving medicine is more or less distinctive to the European medical tradition.