In this chapter I shall explore the significance of the inner organs of the human and animal body as poetic expedient and literary motif in a number of examples from ancient literature, both medical and non-technical. The guts, in fact, variously described and conceptualized, play a variety of roles, concrete and symbolic: they evoke vulnerability, but also strength; nutrition, fullness, and security but also the perpetual state of neediness that qualifies human mortality. I explore, first, the ‘poetic belly’ with its emphasis on vulnerability, nutrition, and life; then, I turn to the natural-philosophical account of guts: nutrition and digestion are centred here, as well as the belly not so much as ensemble of discrete (organic) entities but primarily in terms of volumes – empty containers, ‘pouches’ variously connected. I finally look at the cosmic and cosmogonic extensions in the way the belly and its contents are understood in ancient literatures. With its connection with vitality and survival, the storage of resources and their consummation, then, the belly works thus as a meeting point between medical beliefs and larger culture.

In the first chapter I introduce some methodological issues pertaining to the history of mental health: on the one hand, the issue of anachronism, the problem of retrospective diagnosis, on the other, the importance of maintaining intelligibility across cultures. When it comes to the ancient world, there are specific problems related to the nature of medical sources in Greek and Latin, and our limited access to the medical practices underlying them; in addition, the genre 'biography of disease' has its own pitfalls, namely those of attributing ‘essence’ to what appears, prima facie, to be most of all a construct: a disease concept or label such as phrenitis. Finally, in this chapter I consider the label phrenitis, its etymological meanings and the implications of the name vis-à-vis localization (chest? lungs? diaphragm? heart?) and mental life (mind? character? soul? mental capacities?). I also discuss the ‘Homeric’ appeal of the phrēn/phrenes, the name of the body part from which the label originates. The poetic archaism of phrēn/phrenes combined with its medical use made it both understandable as a generic term for mental life and specifically a ‘medical’ term to indicate the diaphragm, and contributed to making phrenitis a long-lasting disease concept.

In this chapter, I contextualise the engagement of Christian intellectuals with the Roman empire’s medical marketplace in the second century, focusing on Justin Martyr, Tatian, and Pseudo-Justin’s On the Resurrection. I show that Justin, Tatian, and Pseudo-Justin attempted to derive authority from displays of medical and philosophical expertise regarding bodily and mental health. Justin’s limited treatment of bodily health and medicine was driven by his interests in presenting Christians as philosophers who faced death without fear, a goal that aligned him more closely with his philosophical contemporaries. Tatian and Pseudo-Justin, in contrast, launched challenges against the authority of physicians, presenting an ascetic form of regimen as a superior Christian method of achieving excellent bodily and mental health.

This chapter presents the several modes of reduction of the shoulder described by Hippocrates in On Joints 2–7 and evaluates them in relation to the phenomenon of leverage and the ancient tool, the lever (mochlos). It argues that Hippocrates’ understanding of leverage is a feature of his expertise as iētros and did not derive from any separate mechanical or scientific knowledge. This is especially interesting, since Hippocrates knew of the lever and some of its uses, but he describes techniques involving the reciprocal forces exerted between the patient’s dislocated bones and the physician’s own body. The chapter makes use of the analytic distinction between ostension and ostensive definition to characterize this expertise. It distinguishes among experience of physical forces, art that arises from such experience, and the physical principles of leverage that emerged a century or more later. There are references to On Fractures and On the Art.

During the fifth and fourth centuries bce, a number of Greek doctors attempted to base the art of healing on the first principles of all things in general. These “cosmological doctors” included such thinkers as Eryximachus, Philistion, Petron, the unnamed opponents of On Ancient Medicine, and the authors of On the Nature of the Human Being, On Breaths, On Flesh, and On Regimen. Previous studies have approached these thinkers under the rubric of medicine's interactions with “philosophy.” This book, by contrast, will approach them from a medical point of view, arguing that the best way to understand these systems is to view them as responses to preexisting modes of medical thinking.

This chapter begins by arguing that to understand Socrates’ (alleged) autobiography, we need to appreciate that he distinguishes between the terms “aitios” (responsible) and “aitia” (cause). Socrates’ account should be understood against the backdrop of the sophisticated treatments of aitios and aitia and of hypotheses in fifth-century medical treatises. At the same time, the autobiography shows how Socrates – as portrayed throughout Plato’s dialogues – would engage with the natural scientific tradition: he shows his hallmark profession of ignorance; he becomes excited by the prospect of acquiring knowledge of the good; since he is unable to learn this from Anaxagoras or others, he proceeds in a way that does not require knowledge; instead, he hypothesizes the existence of the things sought by his typical “what is it?” question. I argue that Socrates might not be interested in teleology here, as opposed to simply being interested in knowledge of the good. Once we situate the method of hypothesis within the overall dialogue, we can see that it is supposed to help one slowly build rational trust in a theory, thereby avoiding the cycle of trust and doubt that leads to misology.

This chapter offers an overview of the reception of Aristotle’s biology in antiquity and beyond. It argues that Aristotle’s biology remained largely at the margins of the philosophical tradition even after the so-called return to Aristotle in the first century BC. The relative lack of engagement with Aristotle’s biological works reflects a change in the philosophical agenda. While Aristotle placed great emphasis on the philosophical dimension of his biology, his immediate successors considered biology an expendable part of their agenda. For a full appreciation of what Aristotle achieved in the field of biology, we have to go beyond antiquity. The reappropriation of Aristotle’s biological writings was a gradual process that began in the Arabic world and continued in the Latin world.

King explores the reflection in both Plato and Aristotle on styles of causal explanation in the explanation of nature, and examines several texts in which they react to theories of natural necessity in this context. He also reviews the influence of Werner Jaeger’s scholarship on the question of Aristotle’s relation to authors in the Hippocratic Corpus.