Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2012
Abstract
This essay focuses on the role of the general and the particular in the medical diagnostics of Galen of Pergamum. On the one hand, Galen's methodology relies on intelligible principles and physiological models (logical and physical axioms, the theory of primary qualities and their mixtures), on the other hand he regards the knowledge of the individual nature of a patient (his idiosynkrasia) as an important condition of a successful therapy and a task that should be fulfilled to the best of the doctor's abilities, even though it is, strictly speaking, an impossible goal for a human being to reach.