ABSTRACT
The Roman author Celsus praised Hippocrates as the first to separate medicine from the ‘studium sapientiae’, the study of wisdom, or, as we would say, ‘philosophy’.1 If he intended by this to suggest that after Hippocrates medicine and philosophy went their separate ways, and that neither learned or borrowed from the other, he was considerably mistaken.2 Even as some of the texts in the Hippocratic Corpus were being composed, the philosopher Plato was making use of medical data for his own philosophical purposes, as well as putting forward an explanation for illness that was to have a long-lasting impact on the intellectual world.
