Pythagoras: the healer

Regimen rather than the knife, music as medicine, Alcmaeon's teaching of the balance of forces and the daily training of memory.

The natural scientist Pythagoras, as tradition portrays him, includes the healer. Science and research, philosophy and art could not be separated for him. All knowledge had to have consequences and be applied, like a divine mission. Between science and mystery knowledge, between practical work and esotericism, he sought the connecting bond, as consistently as perhaps only Rudolf Steiner did later with anthroposophy.

Way of life before medicine

According to Iamblichus the Pythagoreans held the art of healing in high honour. In medicine they valued above all dietetics, the teaching of the right way of life, and were very exact in it:

They watched for signs in order to find the right balance between work, food and rest.
They were the first to discuss and regulate the preparation of food in detail.
They used oils and ointments more often than earlier physicians and drugs less often, mostly remedies for ulcers.
Cutting and burning, that is surgery, they allowed least of all.
Against some illnesses they used incantations.
They were convinced that music contributes greatly to health if used rightly. Melodies are handed down for the evening, to bring calm, and for the morning, to wake one up.
They also used selected verses of Homer and Hesiod to set the soul right again.

Alcmaeon: health as balance

From Alcmaeon of Croton, physician, philosopher and younger contemporary of Pythagoras, comes the teaching of the balance of forces in the great and the small, in macrocosm and microcosm. It had a long influence. Whether it has Pythagorean roots or the Pythagoreans took it from Alcmaeon, Aristotle already left open.

According to Alcmaeon a person stays healthy as long as the forces are in balance: wet and dry, cold and warm, bitter and sweet and so on. If one of them rules alone, illness arises.

Question	Alcmaeon’s answer
origin of illness	excess of heat or cold
occasion	too much or too little food
seat	in the blood, the marrow or the brain
external causes	the quality of water or land, overexertion, violence
health	an even mixture of the qualities

Alcmaeon’s choice of words is remarkable. The balance of the forces he called isonomia, equality of rights, and the rule of a single force monarchia, sole rule. He described the body in words taken from politics, like a city in which no party may oppress the others. And he was probably the first to recognise the brain as the seat of perception: the senses, he taught, are connected to the brain by channels. From the teaching of balance Greek medicine later developed the doctrine of the four humours, which held until the modern age. Only Paracelsus and after him modern medicine broke away from it (see Paracelsus).

Training the memory

This holistic art of healing even included the power of memory. A Pythagorean did not get up in the morning before he had recalled the previous day. He went through it in order: what he had said, heard or ordered first after rising, what second and third, whom he had met first on going out, which conversations he had held in which order, to the end of the day. He considered what was to come in the same way. If he had more time, he also repeated the day before in the same manner.

The same exercise, only in the evening, is recommended by the Golden Verses, a later collection of Pythagorean rules of life. One should not let sleep come upon weary eyes before one has thought over each deed of the day three times: where have I failed? What have I done? What have I left undone? Seneca tells of the philosopher Quintus Sextius, who asked himself every evening which of his faults he had healed that day. The review of the day thus passed into many traditions, into the Christian examination of conscience as well as into the work on the rough stone (see Know thyself).

What holds up

Some of this today’s medicine has confirmed, some not. That way of life, diet, exercise and sleep help decide our health is basic knowledge today. Music is used in music therapy, and studies show that it can relieve, for instance, anxiety before operations and pain. Incantations, on the other hand, do not heal, and the idea of a balance of warm and cold forces is outdated. What remains is the basic thought: health is a balance, and the right measure is often more important than the strongest remedy.

Sources and further reading

Sources

Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life, around 300 AD, 163 to 164 and 244
Alcmaeon of Croton, fragment B 4 (Diels and Kranz)
Theophrastus, On the Senses 25 to 26 (Alcmaeon)
Golden Verses (Carmen aureum), lines 40 to 44
Seneca, On Anger III 36