Aristotelian Influence in the Formation of Medical Theory

Abstract

Aristotle is oftentimes viewed through a strictly philosophical lens as heir to Plato and has having introduced logical rigor where an emphasis on the theory of Forms formerly prevailed. It must be appreciated that Aristotle was the son of a physician, and that his inculcation of the thought of other Greek philosophers addressing health and the natural elements led to an extremely broad set of biologically- and medically-related writings. As this article proposes, Aristotle deepened the fourfold theory of the elements with anatomic and physiologic observations. In books like History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and the lost Anatomai, he actively dissected organisms and recorded his findings. The corpus of medically-related literature Aristotle developed had a direct influence on subsequent Greek thinkers, including Galen, and on Medieval Islamic and modern Western practitioners such as William Harvey. Aristotle's ideas continue to influence modern medical thinkers in Europe and America through both his interpretation by European philosophers gaining the attention of medical humanists, and his writings’ enduring impact on medical researchers balancing scientific with more personalistic approaches to medicine.

Notes

Notes

1. Albert S. Lyons and R. Joseph Petrucelli, Medicine: An Illustrated History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1978), 153. Cited hereafter as MI.

2. Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1942), 137, 211.

3. CBC News, 8 November 2006, “British Scientists Plan to Create Human-Cow Embryos,” at www.cbc.ca/technology/story/200611/07/hybrid-embryos.html.

4. Keith L. Moore, The Developing Human, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia, PA: W. B. Saunders Co., 1982), 422.

5. Heikki S. Vuorinen, “But Hasn’t Hippocrates Said it All Already... ? Philosophy of Medicine and Changing Traditions,” in Philosophy for Medicine: Applications in a Clinical Context, ed. Martyn Evans, Pekka Louhiala, and Raimo Puustinen (Oxford, UK: Radcliffe Medical Press, 2004), 113–33. Although the notion of the four elements was accepted before Empedocles, he is often credited with its rise. Empedocles’ theory represents an early divergence from a supernatural account of nature, with the four elements taking over powers and, in his system, names, previously attributed to Olympian gods. Ironically, he did not dispute the existence of the gods, but claimed that they, too, were combinations of the elements. The four-element idea was to survive in various forms for 2,000 years following Empedocles.

6. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: New American Library, 1974), 22.

7. Plato, “Philebus,” in Plato's Examination of Pleasure, trans. R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 53.

8. Marshall Clagett, Greek Science in Antiquity (New York: Abelard-Schuman, Inc., 1955), 39. Cited hereafter as GS.

9. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), 160–61. Cited hereafter as HW. Alexander was to later support Aristotle's investigations. For a concise yet thorough examination of Russell's stance on Aristotle and other philosophers appearing in HW, see Isaiah Berlin, “A History of Western Philosophy,” in Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments, ed. Andrew D. Irvine (London: Routledge, 1998), 49–64.

10. James Longrigg, Greek Rational Medicine: Philosophy and Medicine from Alcmaeon to the Alexandrians (London: Routledge, 1993), 149. Cited hereafter as GR.

11. Aristotle, “Sense and Sensibilia” (“De Sensu”), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vols. 1 and 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series LXXI–2, 1984), 693. Cited hereafter as CW.

12. Barry Stroud, The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 107.

13. Gabor Csepregi, The Clever Body (Alberta, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 2006), 129.

14. Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics: The Creative Mind (Totowa, NJ: Helix Books/Rowman & Allanheld, 1983), 142.

15. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 48–49, 501.

16. James G. Lennox, Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origin of Life Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 35. Cited hereafter as AP.

17. Renford Bambrough, The Philosophy of Aristotle, ed. J. L. Creed and A. E. Wardman (New York: New American Library, 1963), 209–24.

18. Theophrastus (AP, 262) examined various seemingly incidental biological phenomena, such as male breasts, female emission, and beards, and questioned whether they come about for a greater biological purpose or are more appropriately explained as the consequence of simple biologic mechanism. See Stephen S. Mason, A History of the Sciences (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 46.

19. Aristotle repeatedly emphasized the heart as the source of both blood and blood vessels. It contained heat, as opposed to the cooler brain. In tracing the eyes’ connection to the brain, he once again emphasized the interlinking blood vessels (Pars Animalia, Book II, 656b18). It is quite possible Aristotle was seeking a unifying principle of the body's inner motions, with the heart as the central locus. Indeed, he described the great vessel (vena cava) and aorta as they split around the pelvis into the extremities as “contributing to the unity of the whole fabric” of the body (Pars Animalia 668b25). With regard to the disagreement between Aristotle and Galen on the mechanism of human conception, see Anthony Preus, “Galen's Criticism of Aristotle's Conception Theory,” Journal of the History of Biology 10 (1977): 65–85. Aristotle was concerned with the question of how the male sperma could physically mix or combine with the female egg. He avoided the problem by postulating the female produces the proximate matter for reproduction, while the semen, composed of a “foam” of pneuma and water, acts as a trigger to start germinative growth without materially contributing to it. Galen contended that a brief impetus offered an insufficient explanation for the complexity of development, and that the semen must remain with and become a part of the evolving fetus.

20. Peter L. Lutz, The Rise of Experimental Biology (Totowa, NJ: Humana Press, 2002), 60.

21. George Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, Vol. 1 (New York: R. E. Krieger Publishing Co., 1975), 710.

22. Edward L. Baldwin, “Tuberculosis: History and Etiology,” in Modern Medicine: Its Theory and Practice, Vol. 3, ed. William Osler and Thomas McCrae (Philadelphia, PA: Lea Brothers & Co., 1907), 137.

23. Richard M. Swiderski, Anthrax: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004), 67.

24. Jon McGinnis, “Scientific Methodologies in Medieval Islam,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 307–27.

25. Emilie Savage-Smith, “Attitudes Toward Dissection in Medieval Islam,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 50 (1995): 67–110.

26. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 238.

27. Sherwin B. Nuland, Doctors: The Biography of Medicine (New York: Vintage, 1995), 128.

28. Walter Pagel, New Light on William Harvey (London: S. Karger, 1976), 4. Cited hereafter as NL.

29. John S. Wilkins, “Spontaneous Generation and the Origin of Life,” The TalkOrigins Archive, April 2004: 1–18, at www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/spontaneous-generation.html.

30. P. J. MacWhirter, “Shifting Paradigms: The Hard Road to Acceptance of the Contagion Principle in Australia,” Australian Veterinary Journal 75 (1997): 515–19. The development of experimental and evidence-based medicine was to await a later adherent of Aristotle, Avicenna.

31. Mervyn Susser, “Falsification, Verification and Causal Inference in Epidemiology,” in Causal Inference, ed. Kenneth J. Rothman (Chestnut Hill, MA: Epidemiology Resources Inc., 1988), 33–34.

32. Douglas L. Weed, “Causal Criteria and Popperian Refutation,” in Rothman, Causal Inference, 15.

33. Lennox provides two examples of “unintended means” in Aristotle—one by natural, the other by human agency. In Metaphysics Book 7, Aristotle cites the instance of an individual's health being restored spontaneously by warm conditions. The change was clearly for the good of the patient, but did not come about by any purposeful means. In Nicomachean Ethics Books 3 and 8, Aristotle describes “transactional” mistakes in which an agent acts on the wrong individual, is ignorant of the act he or she is performing, or when the consequence differs from what they had expected. One could easily relate this line of reasoning to medical mishaps. These examples from Aristotle's writings portray causal efficacy lacking specific original intent. Indeed, Lennox (AP, 275) concludes that a healthy debate took place during Aristotle's life and after on the limits of arguments employing final causes.

34. Bertrand Russell, Mysticism & Logic (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981), 136–37.

35. Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 152. Russell's chromosomal prediction came true in the form of prenatal and neonatal genetic screening, the latter allowing metabolic intervention of the newborn.

36. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 32.

37. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, The Unity of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 263.

38. Ibid., 270.

39. Ibid., 377.

40. Alfred I. Tauber, Confessions of a Medicine Man: An Essay in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 40.

41. Konstantin S. Khroutski, “Personalist Cosmology as the Ultimate Ground for a Science of Individual Wellness,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 29 (2006): 122–46.

42. Ibid., 138.

43. Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” in The Ethics of Aristotle, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Unwin, 1953), 26.

44. Ibid., 70, 145.