Decadence of Hippocratic Medicine

The Decadence of Hippocratic Medicine took place in Greece by the middle of the IV century B.C. Hippocrates was well aware of the trend to give up fresh clinical experience, only to replace it by void theoretical speculations. But then this was a general trend in Ancient Greece. The upper classes despised handicraft  and work in general, especially manual work. Xenophon (Oeconomicus, i.e., The Economist) claims Socrates so asserts about handicraft and workers:

    "Mechanical arts bear a social stigma and are dishonourable in our cities, since such arts damage the body of those who exercise them. Workers are obliged to an enclosed, sedentary life, mostly spending the day close to the fire. This physical degeneration determines a spiritual damage. Furthermore, those engaged in mechanical works lack the time to promote friendship or citizenship, hence they are viewed as bad friends and bad patriots. In warring cities, mechanical artisans are straightforwardly outlaws."

As we shall see, debasement of handicraft and of work in general leads to idleness, war, and void philosophizing, are the determinants of the Fall of the Roman Empire: nobody worked, only the slave and the lower, stigmatized orders. All this led to a slackening of the true power of the Empire, thus paving the way for its gradually falling to pieces to the attacks of the Barbarians.

 Devaluation of work prevented Greek Science from developing into full-fledged modern Science; an indispensable ingredient of which is work with things. So, since IV century BC to V century AD, all that work was awfully viewed all along, at first in Greece, and then in the Greco-Roman world.

Medieval feudalism inherited this view of work as a social stigma. Hence, the trend to neoplatonism, scholasticism, Aristotelianism, apriorism, and all the trouble Bacon found he had to fight against only to be commonsensical. (see my analysis of his Novum Organum).

Back to medicine decadence, let us attempt to understand the nature of the influence of the structure of Classic Ancient Society over Science and Medicine.

In his great treatise, De Fabrica Corporis Humani, Vesalius attempts to explain why the study of anatomy, blooming among the Greeks for centuries, had decayed after Galen. Greek doctors from any school of thought (Dogmatic, Empiric or Methodic) all agreed on the use of 3 resources: 1. Diets, 2. Drugs, and 3. Manual operation. An adequate diet must be prescribed, drugs are used in most cases and the hand in yet as many others. The use of the hand is by no means confined to surgery: it is essential in the making of foods and the preparation of drugs.

" After the barbarian's invasion -he writes- all sciences that had so brightly blossomed and had been so deeply studies feel into the direst oblivion. From the first time in Italy, the best known doctors took after the Ancient Romans and started to look upon manual work with outright contempt. Patients regularly requiring manual treatment -mostly surgery- were referred to the slaves. Shortly after all doctors joined in. They averted all the hard, unwanted, work inherent in the medical profession, however keeping all the wealth and prestige that usually comes with it."

"Thus, slaves who prepared food for the sick became nurses, while those who blended drugs became druggists and finally barbers were in charge of surgery and dentistry. In this way, medical science split into two separate branches: 1. socially valued theoretical doctors who prescribed drugs and diets, and 2. socially debased practical surgeons (mostly slaves) thus parting with the principal nad oldest branch of medical arts, that which relies on the investigation of nature".

"When all manual operations were handed over to barbers, doctors lost sight of true knowledge of viscera and furthermore, gave up the practice of dissection, since doctors did not perform surgical acts., whereas those in charge of manual tasks were too unlearned to read the works of the great masters of anatomy."

But this conflict between debased manual operations and theoretical knowledge soon got widespread in Antiquity. Herodotus, who wrote by the middle of the V century BC points it out:

"Among the Greeks, as well as among the Egyptians, the Persians and other non-Greek peoples, those who learn or practice a trade are less esteemed than the rest of the citizens. Those who have successfully averted the bondage of manual work are Noblemen. The highest honour is reserved for those who devote their lives to war".