Astral Medicine (1)

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The fourth century BCE physician Diocles of Carystus made reference to the ‘ancients’, who ‘made their prognoses of disease on the basis of the phase and orbit of the moon’. This information is quite consistent with diagnostic astrological texts in Late Babylonian sources, if the ‘ancients’ here can be compared with their fellow practitioners in Babylonia, because this type of prognosis was fully developed in Babylonia in later periods, during the last phase of the use of cuneiform script. Such an approach to medicine was not unique to Babylonia, since the author of the Hippocratic treatise on Airs, Waters, Places stresses the contribution of astronomy to medicine, and warns that diseases come to a crisis under the rising of certain stars, especially the Dog Star and Arcturus. We should not conclude, therefore, that Diocles’s comment about the ‘ancients’ refers directly back to Babylonian sources, but only that earlier Greek medicine closely resembled some of the methodology and concepts of Babylonian medicine.

Bibliography

Mark Geller

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