The various schools of Greek philosophy were intimately associated with the study of medicine. They endeavoured to fathom the mystery of life, and the relationship of the visible order of things to the unseen world. The philosophers were therefore not only physicists, but metaphysicians, and the unhappy science of medicine, a homeless wanderer, had to shelter herself now with the natural philosophers and again with the metaphysicians. Probably the philosophers never really practised physic, but merely speculated about it, as did Plato. A brief notice of the various philosophers of the Ionic, Italian, Eleatic, and Materialistic schools who were more or less associated with the study of medicine must suffice as an introduction to Greek medicine proper, which had its origin with Hippocrates.
THALES OF MILETUS (about 609 B.C.), the Ionian philosopher, introduced Egyptian and Asiatic science into Greece. He had probably in his travels in the land of the Pharaohs devoted himself to mathematical pursuits, and if not a scientific inquirer was a deep speculator on the origin of things. He held that everything arises from water, and everything ultimately again resolves itself into water. Everything, he said, is full of gods; the soul originates motion (the magnet has a soul, according to him), and so the indwelling power or soul of water produces the phenomena of the natural world. He must not, however, be understood as teaching the doctrine of the Soul of the Universe, or of a Creating Deity. Thales was the first writer on physics and the founder of the philosophy of Greece. Le Clerc connects him with medicine by his converse with the priest-physicians of Egypt, and that he had performed certain expiatory or purifying ceremonies for the Lacedæmonians which could only be done by such as were divines and physicians.[347]
PHERECYDES, the Syrian, a philosopher who lived about the same time as Thales, is said by Galen to have written upon diet.
EPIMENEDES was a sort of Greek Rip Van Winkle, who purified Athens in the time of a plague by means of mysterious rites and sacrifices. He excelled as a fasting man, so that he was said to have been exempt from the ordinary necessities of nature, and could send out his soul from his body and recall it like the Mahatmas. He was of the class of priestly bards, a seer and prophet who was well acquainted with the virtues of plants for medicinal purposes, and as he was believed to have gone to sleep in a cave for fifty-seven years, he was credited with the possession of supernatural medicinal powers.[348]