Hippocrates Now by Helen King;

Author:Helen King; [King, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350005907
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Holistic Hippocrates: ‘Treating the Patient, Not Just the Disease’

In this final chapter I want to look at the Hippocrates of today not through specific uses in news stories or in quotes, but through the invocation of his name in holistic (or, as we shall see, ‘wholistic’) medicine. Holism today presents itself as a return to a superior past, and brings Hippocrates in as part of this strategy. The model of the history of medicine implicit – or sometimes explicit – in holistic users of Hippocrates is one in which there was a golden age until ‘the turn away from holism in medicine allowed diseases to be located in specific organs, tissues or cells’.1 While there is something in this where ancient medicine is concerned, with its basis in fluids rather than organs, this is of course also a tried and tested strategy for convincing an audience of the value of a ‘new’ thing: you claim it is ‘old’, or ancient, or just traditional. Tracing the lineage of a treatment or approach back to Hippocrates is, as ever, a winning move in a power game. New is bad: traditional, having a history, is good and, if that goes back to the Father of Medicine, it is even better.

After discussing what can be meant by ‘holism’, I shall start by considering various approaches which operate under the umbrella of ‘holistic medicine’ today, and outline their reception of Hippocratic medicine. I shall also locate some of the claims made, in relation to the texts of the ancient Mediterranean world and to the earlier history of holism. I find useful here the model of ‘projection’, described in Chapter 2.2 How does the holistic Hippocrates fit into this practice of projecting our utopias or nightmares? What versions of holism are currently being projected back on to the classical past, what does this tell us about current views of what medicine should be, and how are the classical texts then used to reinforce what their new users mean by holism? Returning to questions raised throughout this book, whose Hippocrates is he anyway – does he belong to orthodox medicine or to alternatives to this – and is he the founder of a system, or the rebel trying to overthrow it?

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