We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The Hippocratic treatise Diseases 4 is well known for explaining corporeal processes through vivid analogies with plants, cupping glasses, bronze vessels, swirling wine sediment, coagulating cheese, and blocked oil flasks. Scholars have often applied a heuristic dichotomy to these arguments, evaluating whether they are “mechanistic” (i.e., rely solely on recognizable physical forces) or “vitalistic” (i.e., attribute special capacities to living tissues and parts). Comparisons to implements tend to line up on the former side, while plant analogies support the latter. Rather than focus on delineating these two types of explanations, this chapter emphasizes that the author draws both sets of comparative objects from the therapies, implements, and techniques that a physician would have either administered to the body or encountered in the more general practice of medicine. Whether comparing the attractive capacity of the four inner “springs” (head, heart, gallbladder, spleen) to medicinal plants drawing up particular nutriment from the soil, or likening these same springs to bronze vessels, Diseases 4 amalgamates medical tools and the bodies that they treat. Its view of corporeality therefore emerges at the physical and conceptual interface between flesh and the therapeutic technologies that affect it, as the body absorbs and enfolds medical tools and substances.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.