Julie Laskaris, The art is long: On the sacred disease and the scientific tradition, Studies in Ancient Medicine, vol. 25Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2002, pp. ix, 172, €69.00, US$81.00 (hardback 90-04-12152-8).

Abstract

On the sacred disease has traditionally been seen as an example of rational, secular medical thought, diametrically opposed to magico-religious practices and superstition. Julie Laskaris argues instead that the work “is best understood as a sophistic protreptic speech that was meant to demonstrate its author's superior understanding and treatment of that disease for the purpose of attracting students and a clientele” (p. 2). Laskaris proposes “a new analytic model” through which to interpret the text (p. 6). This analysis, which she acknowledges owes much to Karl Popper, involves placing the text in its intellectual tradition. This is followed by a survey of modern scholarship on ancient medicine, which tells the historian of medicine nothing new, but is useful for others. Chapter 1 provides an excellent overview of early healers, the transmission of medical knowledge, and the important subject of religious healing. Chapter 2 summarizes On the sacred disease and discusses its early and modern receptions. For all its supposed importance as a harbinger of scientific medicine, the text was not highly regarded in antiquity. Its fame is a nineteenth-century construct. In Chapter 3, Laskaris argues clearly that On the sacred disease should be read as a sophistic protreptic speech. Chapter 4 examines how humoral physiology and its imbalance are used by the author to account for the disease. The length of these humoral explanations are driven, according to Laskaris, by “competition with the magico-religious healers” (p. 131). Were it not so then “the author … would surely have been inclined to make his own account as simple and unified as possible” (p. 133). This is an interesting, but speculative point. Laskaris maintains that the strongly argumentative style of texts such as On the sacred disease and On ancient medicine reflects either an inability or an unwillingness to offer alternative therapies to those provided by magico-religious healers. Because of such constraints, “polemical rhetoric was in effect the only avenue left to secular practitioners to demonstrate their superiority; the similarities in their practices and results prevented them from doing so by any other means” (p. 13). Laskaris' analysis successfully demonstrates that the text has strong protreptic elements which would have been useful in attracting a client base. She is also right to stress the highly competitive milieu in which all manner of persons styling themselves “healers” sought custom. Yet On the sacred disease should also be seen as a text written specifically to censure those practitioners (not just those of a magico-religious persuasion) who acted impiously by misusing the divine. For Laskaris, “statements concerning the divine nature of disease are not relevant to the logic of the author's ideas concerning causation, but are important, rather, for his rhetorical purposes” (p. 114). She notes that Philip van der Eijk regards the treatise as “expressing the author's genuine religious views” (p. 122, n. 77). I concur. If the author takes such pains to argue that epilepsy is no more divine than any other disease, he does so in part to help remove the stigma of an affliction that is associated with divine displeasure. Here the healer's first step in claiming to be able to treat the disease is to define it as an illness and not as a species of divine curse. In this respect, the healer may not be as rigidly “secular” as Laskaris maintains. Be that as it may, Laskaris has assembled sufficient material for the reader to look with fresh eyes at a most important early Hippocratic work, and to evaluate its place in the medical and scientific tradition.