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Introduction – Reflections on Concepts of Health in Their Context. Contrary to what is often believed, health is not simply an objective condition that is easily determined and measured by strict medical criteria in clinical or scientific settings. It is a multifaceted phenomenon whose perception and understanding is influenced profoundly by people’s personal experience, cultural background and social environment. Correspondingly, there is great variety in concepts and definitions of health, both today and in a historical perspective. This collection of studies examines a number of such contextual factors that influence concepts, values and practices related to health, both present and past. It also makes a number of recommendations relevant to medical professionals, politicians, patients and other healthcare stakeholders as to how healthcare systems can be improved and enriched. It advocates a holistic approach to the understanding of health and disease, which involves embracing historical and philosophical concepts in medical reasoning, learning from health practices originated in other parts of the world and establishing interdisciplinary ways of thinking in biomedical research and clinical care.
Vernunft als Therapie und Krankheit: Medizinische Denkfiguren in der Geschichte der Philosophie
(2021)
Reason as Therapy and Illness: Medical Figures of Thought in the History of Philosophy. This paper tackles the question how philosophers have used medical metaphors, analogies or aspects of medical theories in their works. It discusses the idea of ancient Greek philosophy as a medicine of the soul, as well as the Christian surgery of the text-body and finally, how madness became a central problem for the philosophical conception of reason.
Health, Lifestyle and Responsibility: Historical Roots and Current Perspectives. The question to what extent health and disease are matters of individual and collective human responsibility was first raised and systematically discussed in ancient Greek medicine and philosophy in the 5th and 4th century BCE. This chapter discusses the consequences of these discussions for the definition of the aims and methods of the medical art, in particular the preservation and enhancement of health and the prevention of disease through lifestyle-related prophylactic and therapeutic measures. It also considers some of the implications of these ancient discussions for today’s theory and practice of preventative and lifestyle-related medicine.
The Art of Medicine and Philosophy: On the Genesis of a Basic Relationship in European Thought. Referring to the examples of Hippocrates and Socrates, in this essay, we establish the thesis that philosophy and medicine in Greek philosophy are to be regarded as strongly interdependent. In their view, interpretations of health and disease are intertwined with various contexts or settings such as living conditions, environment and climate, which has implications for the therapy of patients as an art of healing. The relevance and philosophical perspectives of this epoch for modern medicine and public health on a globalized planet are highlighted.
Concepts of Man – Concepts of Health: A Glimpse of Their Relationship in Antiquity With Relevance to Our Day and Age. Referring to ancient miraculous healing narratives, this article argues that concepts of health are inextricably intertwined with concepts of man. However, the relatively autonomous idea of medical treatments based on scientific reasoning is not an invention of modern secularization. It already existed in antiquity – even among people of faith. Gods and other religious authorities were regarded as mediating factors; they were not held responsible for diseases or cures. Examples from Christian and pagan traditions show that the interplay between ideas of man and concepts of health were extremely complex and diverse. Obviously, this was true already in antiquity – but it is even more evident in the present. Dualistic confrontations (e. g., pre-modern versus modern times, pre-scientific healing vs. academic medicine) are of little help to achieve universal health care and global health.
Byzantine Medicine as a Concept of Late Ancient Christian Healing Art. The great success of Greco-Roman medicine – in its main stream a brilliant combination of humoral pathology and dietetics canonized by Galen of Pergamon in the 2nd century CE – is probably the most surprising phenomenon of conceptual longevity in the history of Western culture and civilization. Its decline begins as late as in the early 17th century, when William Harvey describes the circulation of blood on the basis of the new experimental method, initiating not only the collapse of Galen’s theory of blood circulation, but also of humoral physiology and pathology in general. Only then, i. e., more than 1500 years after Galen and 2000 years after Hippocrates, new theoretical concepts of medicine appear on the horizon, gradually replacing medical thinking of antiquity. However, the evolution of Greco-Roman medicine was not a straightforward process; it was strongly influenced by changes in language and dramatic institutional and political changes after the separation of the Roman Empire at the end of the 4th century. Byzantine medicine in the East encompasses the common medical practices of the empire from about 400 to 1453 AD, compiling and standardizing medical knowledge and wisdom (iatrosophia) into new Greek textbooks.