Humanism in Medicine and Psychiatry *

When Hippocrates lashed out against superstition and wrote his treatise on epilepsy, he seems to have provided a formula and he indicated a trend for the whole history of the relationship between medicine and psychiatry. The trend, under different guises and expressed in different languages and terminology, is as potent today as it was twenty-four hundred years ago. Epilepsy, Hippocrates almost shouted, is not a "sacred disease," but a natural one. The word "sacred" is now forgotten and "psychological" has taken its place; the word "natural" has been supplanted by "organic." This implied conflict still persists in all its essentials. Hippocrates fought against the mystic templar tradition. The scientific struggle continues now between two branches of medicine. The occasional thrusts made against the Church and Christianity, or against religion in general, as the supposed chief agent responsible for extreme psychological orientations, are only partially correct, if correct at all. The struggle originated by Hippocrates was acute centuries before the advent of Christ, and over a millennium before the so-called Dark Ages. It is doubtful whether the conflict between medicine and psychiatry in the Middle Ages and during the greater part of the Renaissance was due primarily to the established Christian theology. The constant, hair-splitting argumentation of the Middle Ages, which sought to establish a differential diagnosis between "natural" and "supernatural" diseases, in no way differed in its substance from the corresponding attitude which Hippocrates brought into focus when he wrote his treatise on The Sacred Disease. It is quite obvious that we deal here with a fundamental problem which transgresses the confines of a given historical period and of a given set of cultural conditions. One is led rather forcibly to the suspicion that we are dealing here with a certain limitation of man's