The Human Skin: A Meeting Ground for the Ideas about Macrocosm and Microcosm in Ancient and Medieval Greek Literature (2001)
Diamandopoulos, Athanasios (Author)
Goudas, Pavlov (Author)
Diamantopoulou, Hilary (Author)
Vesalius
Volume: 7
Pages: 94--101
We have been interested in the cleansing capacity of skin during the recent years. In a paper of ours (1) we presented a few references to Hippocrates' and Galen's ideas on the subject, while the main body of the article was based on the 17th-20th centuries' relative practices. In a second paper (2), we were mainly testing the ancient and Medieval Greek ideas on skin catharsis against some clinical work of ours. In this paper we now present the ideas of the pagan and Byzantine Greek authors (5th cent. BC -10th cent. AD) on the relationship of the human body to the natural and man-made world. Special emphasis is given to the relationship between purification through the skin and world purification. Based on the similarity of Empedokles 'conceptol'the four elements and Hippocrates'thesis concerning the four humours, the Earth itself was personified and became a living organism that felt cold, perspired and became dry. Man started to seek a natural explanation for his diseases and alterations of his body functions. Hence, perspiration, fever, urination, headache, stroke, were explainedin cosmologicalterms. Extracts from many medical and non-medical writers, like Empedocles, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, the Fathers of the Church, Meletius latrosophista, Theophilus Protospatharius, Michael Psellus and other sources are presented, in order to show the close relationship between an abundance of diseases and an array of natural phenomena.
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