A structural pattern in Greek dietetics and the early history of Greek medicine.

INTRODUCTION Early Greek medicine-the medicine actually practised by Greek doctors of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and reflected in various texts of the Hippocratic Corpushas two noticeable characteristics. In its nosology it conceives of disease as a process, which runs a predictable course, reaching a crisis which "determines" or "decides" the recovery or death ofthe patient.1 In its therapy it lays great emphasis on diet (DIAITA), which includes the whole regimen of food, drink, exercise, and baths which the patient should adopt to aid his recovery. Such regimens do not differ in kind from those which are prescribed for the healthy man in order to maintain or to improve his health. The comparative evidence from Mesopotamia and Egypt is limited, but it does seem to suggest that these two points are quite distinctive of Greek medicine.2 Are they also archaic and original characteristics, or are they a product of the rational and speculative medicine which apparently began in the fifth century, in response to and reaction against the cosmological and physiological speculation of pre-Socratic philosophy?