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T ools a nd t h e Organi sm
To ol s an d
the Or g an ism
Technology and the Body in Ancient
Greek and Roman Medicine
Colin Webster
The Universi ty of C hi cag o P r es s

C hicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2023 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief
quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact
the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2023
Printed in the United States of America
32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 1 2 3 4 5
ISB N-13: 978-0-226-82877-0 (cloth)

IS BN-13: 978-0-226-82878-7 (e-book)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226828787.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Webster, Colin (Classicist), author.

Title: Tools and the organism : technology and the body in ancient Greek
and Roman medicine / Colin Webster.
Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCC N 2023008555 | ISBN 9780226828770 (cloth) | IS BN
9780226828787 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Medicine, Greek and Roman. | Human body
(Philosophy)—History. | Philosophy, Ancient.
Classification: L CC R138 .W43 2023 | DD C 610.938—dc23/eng/20230419
L C record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023008555
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Abbreviations vii
Notes on Translations, Names, Citations, and Editions xv
I n t ro duct io n
0.1 Technologies and the Consolidation of the Body 1
0.2 Teleology, Mechanism, Vitalism, and Technology 7
0.3 Analogies, Metaphors, and Models 12
0.4 Chapter Overview 18
1 : H ipp o c r ate s a n d T ec hno lo g ic a l I nt e r fac e s

1.0 Introduction 23
1.1 Corporeal Composition without Organs 28
1.2 Regimen and the Body 35
1.3 Hippocrates’s Nature of the Human 45
1.4 Medical Implements and Hippocrates’s Morb. 4/Genit./Nat. Pue. 54
1.5 Female Corporeality and Gynecological Technologies 67
1.6 Conclusion 75
2: Th e O r igin s o f t h e Org a ni s m
2.0 Introduction 77
2.1 Empedocles’s Clepsydra and the Corporeal Interior 81
2.2 Physikoi on Corporeal Tools 94
2.3 Plato’s Timaeus and Competing Technological Heuristics 97
2.4 Respiration, the Clepsydra, and Irrigation Pipes of the Fifth
Century BCE 102
2.5 Irrigation and Water Distribution Technologies 110
2.6 Conclusion 118
3: A r ist ot l e a n d t h e E m e rg e nc e o f t h e O rg a n i s m
3.0 Introduction 119
3.1 The Soul and the Organism 122
3.2 The Tools of the Heart 127
3.3 The Journey of the Blood 140
3.4 Automata and Animal Motion 144
3.5 Conclusion 157
4 : Th e Ris e o f the O rg a ni s m i n t he He l l e n i sti c P e r i od

4.1 The Rise of Anatomy 161
4.2 Herophilus of Chalcedon and Dissection Practices 166
4.3 Herophilus’s Bellows 172
4.4 Erasistratus of Ceos and Pneumatic Pathologies 176
4.5 Conclusion 191
5 : Th e O rga ni s m a nd Its Alt e r nat i ve s

5.1 Post-Erasistratean Hellenistic Organa 195
5.2 The Empiricist Resistance 198
5.3 The Infrastructure of Roman Power 199
5.4 Asclepiades of Bithynia 202
5.5 Asclepiades and Aqueducts 211
5.6 Methodism and Organic Activites 218
5.7 Soranus and Female Corporeality in Methodism 223
5.8 Conclusion 226
6: Galen and the Technologies of the Vitalist Organism

6.1 The Return of Anatomy 232
6.2 Galen of Pergamon and On the Function of the Parts 236
6.3 Technologies and the Natural Faculties 245
6.4 Vivisection and the Vitalist Body 253
6.5 Logical and Material Tools of the Lemmatized Body 258
6.6 The Material Technologies of Vitalism 263
6.7 Conclusion 270
Co nc lu sio n 273
Acknowledgments 279
Bibliography 283
Index 313
Abbreviations
Aëtius (Aët.)
Aelian (Ael.)
Nat. anim. ▶ De natura animalium/Nature of Animals
Anonymus Londinensis (Anon. Lond.)
Anonymus (Anon.)
Morb. Ac. et Chr. ▶ De morbis acutis et chroniis/On Acute and Chronic Diseases
Aristocritus (Aristocr.)
Theos. ▶ Theosophy
Aristophanes (Ar.)
Eccl. ▶ Ecclesiazusae/Assembly Women
Fr. ▶ Fragments
Plut. ▶ Plutus/Wealth
Ran. ▶ Ranae/Frogs
Aristotle (Arist.)
Cael. ▶ De caelo/On the Heavens
De an. ▶ De anima/On the Soul
De motu an. ▶ De motu animalium/On the Movement of Animals
Gen. an. ▶ De generatione animalium/On the Generation of Animals
Hist. an. ▶ Historia animalium
Juv. ▶ De juventute et senectute/On Youth and Old Age
Metaph. ▶ Metaphysica/Metaphysics
Mete. ▶ Meteorologica/Meteorology
Part. an. ▶ De partibus animalium/Parts of Animals
Ph. ▶ Physica/Physics
Poet. ▶ Poetica/Poetics
Pol. ▶ Politica/Politics
Pr. ▶ Problemata/Problems
Resp. ▶ De respiratione/On Breathing
Rhet. ▶ Ars Rhetorica/Rhetoric
viii | a bb r e v i a t i o n s
Sens. ▶ De sensu et sensibilibus/On Sense and Sensible Things

Somn. ▶ De somno et vigilia/On Sleep and Wakefulness
Athenaeus (Ath.)
Deipnosophistae
Athenaeus Mechanicus (Athen. Mech.)
Caelius Aurelianus (Cael. Aur.)
Tard. Pass. ▶ Tardae passiones/De morbis chronicis/Chronic Affections
Acut. Pass. ▶ Celeres passiones/De morbis acutis/Acute Diseases
Calcidius (Calcid.)
In Tim. ▶ In Platonis Timaeum commentarius/Commentary on Plato’s Ti-
maeus
Cassius Iatrosophista (Cass. Iatr.)
Pr. ▶ Problemata/Problems
Celsus
Med. ▶ De medicina/On Medicine
Censorinus (Cens.)
Die nat. ▶ Dies natalis/On Birthdays
Cicero (Cic.)
Att. ▶ Epistulae ad Atticum/Letters to Atticus
De or. ▶ De oratore/On Oratory
Clement of Alexandria (Clem. Al.)
Protr. ▶ Protrepticus
Strom. ▶ Stromata
CMG ▶ Corpus Medicorum Graecorum
Dio Chrysostom (Dio Chrys.)
Or. ▶ Orationes/Discourses
Diodorus Siculus (Diod. Sic.)
Diogenes of Apollonia (Diog. Ap.)
Diogenes Laertius (Diog. Laert.)
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Dion. Hal.)
Ant. Rom. ▶ Roman Antiquities
Dioscorides (Dioscor.)
MM ▶ De materia medica
DK ▶ Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, eds. (1903) 2018. Die Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Empedocles (Emped.)
Frontinus (Frontin.)
Aq. ▶ De aquaeductu urbis romae/On the Water Supply of the City of Rome
Galen (Gal.)
AA ▶ De anatomicis administrationibus/Anatomical Procedures
Ad. Lyc. ▶ Adversus Lycum/Against Lycus
a bb r e v i a t i o n s | ix
Aff. Dig. ▶ De propriorum animi cuiusque affectum dignotione et curatione;

De animi cuiuslibet peccatorum dignotione et curatione/The Diagnoses and
Treatments of Affections and Errors
Art. Sang. ▶ An in arteriis natura sanguis contineatur/On Whether Blood is
Naturally Contained in the Arteries
At. Bil. ▶ De atra bile/Black Bile
Comp. Med. Gen. ▶ De compositione medicamentorum per genera/The Compo-
sition of Drugs According to Kind
Comp. Med. Loc. ▶ De compositione medicamentorum secundum locos/The
Composition of Drugs According to Places
Const. Art. Med. ▶ De constitutione artis medicae/The Composition of the Art
of Medicine
[Def. Med.] ▶ Definitiones medicae/Medical Definitions
Di. Dec. ▶ De diebus decretoriis/Critical Days
Diff. Puls. ▶ De differentiis pulsum/The Distinct Types of Pulse
Dig. Puls. ▶ De dignoscendis pulsibus/Diagnosing the Pulses
Elem. ▶ De elementis ex Hippocrate/Elements According to Hippocrates
Foet. Form. ▶ De foetuum formatione/On the Formation of the Foetus
Hipp. Aph. ▶ In Hippocratis Aphorismos/Commentary on Hippocrates’s Aph-
orisms
Hipp. Art. ▶ In Hippocratis Articulos/Commentary on Hippocrates’s Joints
Hipp. Epid. VI ▶ In Hippocratis Epidemiarum/Commentary on Hippocrates’s
Epidemics
[Hist. phil.] ▶ Historia philosophica/History of Philosophy
In Hipp. Nat. Hom. ▶ In Hippocratis Naturam Hominis/Commentary on Hip-
pocrates’s On the Nature of the Human
Ind. ▶ De indolentia/Περὶ Ἀλυπίας/Avoiding Distress
Inst. Od. ▶ De instrumento odoratus/The Organ of Smell
[Int.] ▶ Introductio seu medicus/Introduction
Lib. Prop. ▶ De libris propriis/My Own Books
Loc. Aff. ▶ De locis affectis/Affected Places
Med. Exp. ▶ De experientia medica/Medical Experience
MM ▶ De methodo medendi/Method of Healing
Nat. Fac. ▶ De facultatibus naturalibus/Natural Faculties
Opt. Med. Cogn. ▶ De optimo medico cognoscendo/Discovering the Best Phy-
sician
Ord. Lib. Prop. ▶ De ordine librorum propriorum/The Order of My Own Books
PHP ▶ De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis/The Opinions of Hippocrates and
Plato
Praec. ▶ De praecognitione ad Epigenem/Prognosis, for Epigenes
Prop. Plac. ▶ De propriis placitis/My Own Opinions
x | a bb r e v i a t i o n s
Ptis. ▶ De ptisana/Barley Gruel

San. Tu. ▶ De Sanitate Tuenda/On the Preservation of Health
Sect. ▶ De sectis ad eos qui introducuntur/On Sects for Beginners)
Sem. ▶ De semine/Semen
SMT ▶ De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis ac facultatibus/The
Properties of Simple Drugs
Syn. Puls. ▶ Synopsis de pulsibus/A Synopsis of the Pulse
Temp. ▶ De temperamentis/Mixtures
[Ther. Pis.] ▶ De theriaca ad Pisonem/Theriac, for Piso
Thras. ▶ Thrasybulus sive Utrum medicinae sit aut gymnasticae hygiene/Thra-
sybulus, whether Hygiene Belongs to Medicine or Physical Training
Trem. Palp. ▶ De tremore, palpitatione, convulsione, et rigore/Tremor, Spasm,
Convulsion, and Shivering
UP ▶ De usu partium/On the Function of the Parts
Us. Puls. ▶ De usu pulsuum/On the Function of the Pulse
Us. Resp. ▶ De usu respirationis/On the Function of Breathing
Ut. Diss. ▶ De uteri dissectione/On the Anatomy of the Womb
Ven. Sect. Er. ▶ De venae sectione adversus Erasistratum/Bloodletting, Against
Erasistratus
Herodotus
Hist. ▶ Histories
Herophilus (Heroph.)
Heron
Aut. ▶ De automatis/Automata
Def. ▶ Definitiones/Definitions
Pneum. ▶ Pneumatica/Pneumatics
Hippocrates (Hipp.)
Acut. ▶ De victu acutorum/On Regimen in Acute Diseases
Aer. ▶ De aere, aquis, locis/Airs, Waters, Places
Aff. ▶ De affectionibus/Affections
Art. ▶ De arte/On the Art
Artic. ▶ De articulis/On Joints
Alim. ▶ De alimento/Nutriment
Anat. ▶ De anatome/Anatomy
Aph. ▶ Aphorismi/Aphorisms
Carn. ▶ De carnibus/Flesh
Cord. ▶ De corde/On the Heart
Decent. ▶ De decenti habitu/Decorum
Ep. ▶ Epistulae/Letters
Epid. ▶ De morbis popularibus/Epidemiae/Epidemics
Flat. ▶ De flatibus/Winds
a bb r e v i a t i o n s | xi
Fract. ▶ De fracturis/Fractures
Genit. ▶ De genitura/Generation
Gland. ▶ De glandulis/Glands
Haem. ▶ De haemorrhoidibus/Haemorrhoids
Int. ▶ De internis affectionibus/Internal Affections
Iusi. ▶ Iusiurandum/The Oath
Loc. Hom. ▶ De locis in homine/Places in the Human
Medic. ▶ De medico/Physician
Morb. 1 ▶ De morbis 1/Diseases 1
Morb. Sacr. ▶ De morbo sacro/On the Sacred Disease
Mul. 1, 2, and 3 ▶ De morbis mulierum/De mulierum affectibus/Diseases of
Women 1, 2, and 3
Nat. Hom. ▶ De natura hominis/Nature of the Human
Nat. Mul. ▶ De natura muliebri/Nature of Woman
Nat. Pue. ▶ De natura pueri/Nature of the Child
Oss. ▶ De ossium natura/Nature of Bones
Pharm. ▶ Peri pharmakon/On Drugs
Prog. ▶ Prognosticum/Prognostic
Salubr. ▶ De salubri diaeta/Regimen in Health
Ulc. ▶ De ulceribus/Wounds
Vict. ▶ De victu/De diaeta/Regimen
VM ▶ De vetere medicina/On Ancient Medicine
Hippolytus (Hippol.)
Haer. ▶ Refutatio omnium haeresium/Refutation of All Heresy
Homer (Hom.)
Il. ▶ Iliad
Od. ▶ Odyssey
Hom. Hymn Dem. ▶ Homeric Hymn to Demeter
Iamblichus (Iambl.)
Myst. ▶ De mysteriis/On the Mysteries
LM ▶ Laks, André, and Glenn W. Most, eds. (2016). Early Greek Philosophy,
vols. I–IX. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
LSJ ▶ Liddell, George Henry, Robert Scott, and Henry Stuart Jones, eds. (1940).
Greek-English Lexicon, with a revised supplement, 9th ed. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Ibn Abī Us·aybiʿah
Uyūn al-anbāʾ ▶ Uyūn al-anbāʾ fī t.abaqāt al-at.ibbā/Literary History of Medicine
xii | a bb r e v i a t i o n s
Lucretius (Lucr.)
DRN ▶ De rerum natura/On the Nature of Things
Macrobius (Macrob.)
In Somn. ▶ Commentarii in somnium Scipionis/Commentary on the Dream of
Scipio
Musonius Rufus (Mus. Ruf.)
Nicophon
Fr. ▶ Fragments
Oribasius
Coll. Med. ▶ Collectiones medicae/Medical Collections
Philo
Pneum. ▶ Pneumatica/Pneumatics
Plato (Pl.)
Phdr. ▶ Phaedrus
Plt. ▶ Politicus
Prt. ▶ Protagoras
Rep. ▶ Republic
Tht. ▶ Thaeatetus
Ti. ▶ Timaeus
Pliny (Plin.)
HN ▶ Historia naturalis/Natural History
Plutarch (Plut.)
Adv. Col. ▶ Adversus Colotem/Against Colotes
De Amic. ▶ De amicorum multitudine/Having Many Friends
Per. ▶ Pericles
Prim. frig. ▶ De primo frigido
Quaest. conv. ▶ Quaestiones convivales
Polybius (Polyb.)
Hist. ▶ Historiae/Histories
Porphyry (Porph.)
Iliad ▶ Quaestiones Homericarum ad Iliadum pertinentium reliquiae/Homeric
Questions on the Iliad
Praxagoras (Praxag.)
Pseudo-Aristotle ([Arist.])
Sud. ▶ De sudore/On Sweat
Pseudo-Iamblichus (Ps.-Iambl.)
Theol. ▶ Theologoumena arithmeticae
Pseudo-Plutarch (Ps.-Plut.)
Plac. ▶ Placita philosophorum
Strom. ▶ Stromateis/Miscellanies
a bb r e v i a t i o n s | xiii
Pseudo-Socrates ([Soc.])
Ep. ▶ Epistulae/Letters (Epistolographi Graeci)
Rufus of Ephesus (Ruf. Eph.)
Anat. ▶ De partibus corporis humani/On the Anatomy of the Parts of the Body
Onom. ▶ De corporis humani appellationibus/On the Names of the Parts of
the Body
Scholia in Euripidem (Schol. in Eur.)
Seneca
Ep. ▶ Epistulae/Letters
Sextus Empiricus (Sext. Emp.)
Math. ▶ Adversus mathematicos/Against the Logicians
Pyr. ▶ Πυρρώνειοι ὑποτυπώσεις/Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Simpl.
In Cael. ▶ In Aristotelis de caelo commentaria/Commentary on Aristotle’s On
the Heavens
In Phys. ▶ In Aristotelis Physicorum libros quattuor posteriors commentaria/
Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics
Soranus (Sor.)
Gyn. ▶ Gynaeciorum libri iv/Gynecology
[Quaest. med.] ▶ Quaestiones medicinales/Medical Questions
Vita Hippocr. ▶ Vita Hippocratis/Life of Hippocrates
Sophocles (Soph.)
Fr. ▶ Fragments
Stobaeus (Stob.)
Anth. ▶ Anthologium/Anthology
Tatian (Tat.)
Or. ▶ Oratio ad Graecos/Oration to the Greeks
Tertullian (Tert.)
De an. ▶ De testimonio animae
Theophrastus (Theophr.)
Hist. pl. ▶ Historia plantarum/Inquiry into Plants
Sens. ▶ De sensibus
Themistius (Them.)
In Phys. ▶ In Aristotelis Physica/On Aristotle’s Physics 1–3
Vitruvius (Vitr.)
De arch. ▶ De architectura/On Architecture
Notes on Translations, Names,
Citations, and Editions
All translations are my own, except where otherwise indicated.

After much consultation and internal debate, I have used the more
common Latinized versions of Greek names. Despite my own ideological
objections to the compression of the ancient Greek world into its Roman
reception, I have done this so as not to alienate nonspecialist audiences,
who might be unnecessary perplexed by references to Hippokrates and
Klearkhos rather than Hippocrates and Clearchus. As for the titles of texts
themselves, I generally use an English translation, except where doing so
would add confusion rather than reduce it; and when a Latinized version
is in wide and common usage, I have kept it.
For all physikoi, I cite the Diels-Kranz passages, followed by the Laks
and Most Harvard Loeb edition fragment numbers and the original au-
thor and work from which the passage was excerpted. While expanding
these citations considerably, this allows for both specialists and nonspe-
cialists to find these references without consulting multiple editions.
When citing Hippocratic texts, I have consulted modern scholarly edi-
tions wherever possible, although I have cited the divisions presented
within the Loeb Harvard editions, since these are the most readily acces-
sible editions for most English readers. Each Hippocratic citation is also
cross-referenced with the Littré editions to ease finding passages within
critical editions in various languages. My citations also employ only ara-
bic numerals. What each of these numerals refers to depends on the indi-
vidual text, but citations always operate from largest to smallest divisions,
i.e., book, chapter/section, paragraph/entry. For example, the third entry
in the first section of Epidemics 6 would be cited as Epid. 6.1.3, whereas
the second chapter of Places in the Human, which does not have book divi-
sions, would be cited as Loc. Hom. 2.
For Galen, I have again used Loeb citations where possible, or used sec-
tion divisions seen in the most common English translations, but since
xvi | N o t e s o n T r a n s l a t i o n s , N a m e s , C i t a t i o n s , a n d E d i t i o n s
these translations are not always obvious or readily available, I have gen-
erally indicated which edition I have relied upon. A list of current crit-
ical editions and translations can be found in Nutton 2020. All Galenic
citations are cross-referenced with the Kühn volumes where possible for
clarification, except where no Kühn volume is available. Citations for Ga-
len likewise use only arabic numerals according to the same descending
divisions (book, chapter, paragraph).
For other medical authors, I cite the collection or edition I have used
when relevant, and these editions can be found in the general bibli
ography.
Introduction
0.1 Technologies and t he

Consolidation of the Body
No narrative of the future would be complete without bodies augmented

or integrated with technologies. Synthetic amalgams of machine and an-
imal, robot and human, and computer and consciousness form key signs
in the semiotics of our imagined futures. Our literary and visual imagi-
nations remain fascinated with technologies infiltrating corporeal struc-
tures, mimicking creatures, and synthesizing life. Of course, this techno-
future does not belong to some upcoming era but has already exploded
our present. Modern lives teem with interfaces, wearables, and websites,
such that knowledge of our own bodies arrives heavily mediated by tools,
devices, and apparatuses. Even the standard medical encounter starts
with a blood-pressure monitor and pulse oximeter, and any ailments that
require specialized diagnosis involve higher echelons of technologies and
techniques. Even as I write this, my watch tells me that I have failed to
exercise sufficiently and that I have not stood frequently enough to satisfy
its demands. Tools mediate our understanding of corporeality as well as
forming integral parts of our own embodied experiences.
The aura of futurity emanating from such notions can provoke ques-
tions about the relationship between technologies and medicine in the
deep past. How did tools shape notions of the body before X-rays, MRIs
and the marriage of diagnostics and machines? How did technologies in-
terface with humans at both physical and conceptual levels in a world
without centrifuges, robot surgeries, or sonograms? This book aims to
show that despite a medical environment populated with fewer machines
than today, technologies were still crucial to ancient Greek and Roman
ideas about corporeality from the very moment the body emerged as the
primary object of medical expertise in the fifth century BCE. They con-
tinued to be a central part of medical discourse across classical antiquity
2 | I n t r o d uct i o n
into the second century CE and beyond, structuring questions about what
type of object the body is, what types of substances it contains, and how
its parts function. In fact, tools and technologies were essential to the de-
velopment of the idea that the body functioned in the first place.
It requires some effort to recognize how some of our most basic as-
sumptions about corporeality are indebted to tools. For example, in her
Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway boldly declared that the microelec-
tronic communications and synthetic hormones of the late twentieth
century (and now twenty-first) have produced new corporeal configura-
tions and fresh embodied extensions. She claims that as a result “we are
all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism;
in short, we are cyborgs.”1 Haraway’s cyborg presents a useful image in
two ways. On the one hand, even if the opportunities for transformative
technological interventions have multiplied, the following chapters will
demonstrate that the interpenetration of technologies and bodies oc-
curred in various ways throughout ancient medical contexts, sometimes
creating cyborg-like arrangements. On the other hand, Haraway’s juxta-
position of “machines and organisms” captures a linguistic oddity that
reveals even more clearly how conceptions of tools and bodies did not
only start merging in the recent past.2 In current English usage, “organ-
isms” are living objects, while “organs” are the major parts that compose
such beings and perform hierarchically arranged somatic tasks. Despite
the associations of the English term with life, growth, and biotic purity,
the words “organic” and “organism” both derive from the Greek word or-
ganon, which means “tool.” Calling a living thing an “organism” is already
to state that it is tool-like. This book traces the origins of this linguistic
flip and the other ways that technologies impacted ancient theories of the
body in biomedical discourses.
Although there are many ways to examine the relationship of tools and
bodies, this book argues that understanding how technologies influenced
medical theories requires traveling along at least three interrelated axes,
which we might call the structural, investigative, and analogical. The first
follows how the concept of a “tool” began to structure ancient ideas about
the corporeal whole and how its component parts relate to one another.
This was not always the case. Hippocratic medical authors of the fifth
1. Haraway 1991: 150.

2. We might also consider Canguilhem’s 1952 lecture “Machine and Organ-
ism,” which provides another classic example of treating these categories as on-
tological opposites, even as he attempts to break down barriers between them;
see Canguilhem 2008: 75–97.
I n t r o d uct i o n | 3
century BCE never use the term “tools” [organa] to describe inner parts of
the body. When they mention the heart, lungs, liver, gallbladder, kidneys,
bladder, spleen, and other internal structures that we call organs, they
use terms like “viscera” [σπλάγχναd], “places” [τόποι], “spaces” [ χωρία],
“parts” [μέρεα], or “structures” [σχήματα].3 Rather than being a simple
variance in nomenclature, this terminology reflects substantially different
notions about what internal parts do and how they relate to the human
whole. Hippocratic bodies generally did not “work,” “operate,” or “func-
tion” as hierarchical physical systems that sustained life. Instead, Hippo-
cratic authors consolidated corporeality in other ways, notably around the
concept of an intrinsic “nature” [ἡ φύσις] and the maintenance of a ho-
meostatic balance of humors, all without employing the model of a multi-
part machine. Nevertheless, the seeds of tool-like functional parts appear
in their texts and even predated the Hippocratics, appearing among pre-
Socratic natural philosophers such as Empedocles. It was Plato, however,
who first explicitly referred to corporeal parts as tools, and Aristotle who
expanded this idea by characterizing the body as a tool-like functional
object whose parts contributed to the maintenance of life. This view of
the body flourished in the Hellenistic period, after Aristotle’s death, and
in the second century CE, Galen cemented its primacy as the core way to
think about corporeality. We still live with this conceptual legacy today.
Recognizing the conceptual impact of organa on ideas about corpo-
real structures contextualizes a second axis of inquiry, one that empha-
sizes how material tools, implements, and technological procedures sup-
ported and influenced competing medical theories. Notions about the
body changed quite dramatically across classical antiquity, and different
ancient authors proposed divergent ideas about somatic components, ca-
pacities, and behaviors. This book emphasizes that these theories did not
develop in an intellectual vacuum but were supported by varying sets of
tools and techniques. In fact, as Peter Galison has stressed, certain tech-
nologies can embody and imply larger theoretical and methodological
commitments.4 The corollary of this observation is that new theoretical
commitments can also imply new tools. Indeed, the rise of the organized
body in the Hellenistic period, with its emphasis on functional parts,
led to the rise of dissection as an investigative mode. These epistemic
practices structured corporeality in certain ways, consolidating the body
3. See Byl 1971; Ioannidi 1981.

4. Galison 1997: 2. For this reason, he states that laboratory machines are
“dense with meaning.”
around solid components rather than liquids or humors. Tools of dissec-

tion therefore encoded a theory about what type of object the body was.
It is also crucial to recognize that dissection and other modes of inves-
tigation did not simply reveal previously hidden corporeal features and ac-
tivities. To be sure, many corporeal behaviors that we now take for granted
did not seem obvious to ancient authors, including the assertion that the
lungs expand and contract, that the heart beats, or that the blood circu-
lates. Rather than attribute these discrepancies to the fumbles of crude
thinkers, we should acknowledge that these features needed to be made
visible and, more important, made relevant to models of the body. Yet, as
Ian Hacking notes, investigations can structure and stabilize the world to
the point that they can create new phenomena.5 This reciprocal relation-
ship can go even deeper. Scholars from fields as diverse as the history of
science, performance studies, and anthropology have made use of Bruno
Latour’s idea of the body as an “interface.” For Latour, the body does not
have some essential, unchanging nature but is constructed in an ongo-
ing affective relationship with the objects it encounters. Tools therefore
“articulate” it by teaching it to be affected in certain ways.6 Latour uses
the example of a fragrance kit that an aspiring perfumer uses to gain the
ability to discern different, hitherto unregistered scents and chemicals.
By teaching an individual how to discern these smells, this kit articulates
the nose and its capacities in ways that would not have existed without its
intervention. Ancient authors, too, use various techniques to “articulate”
the substances, properties, and behaviors of the body, especially insofar
as many corporeal features rely on some technological interface to be
seen. For example, numerous commentators have attempted to identify
the corporeal substance that Galen or the Hippocratic author of Nature of
the Human are describing when they discuss “black bile,” since no obvi-
ous correlate can be distinguished in bodies as we now experience them.
Yet both authors insist that they draw this humor out through the appli-
cation of certain emetic drugs, especially at certain times of year. Rather
than reject their assertions as incorrect observations or sloppy inferences,
it is more useful to acknowledge that “black bile” was not a simple cor-
poreal fluid that we can locate and identify. It was a substance that was
articulated through a body’s interaction with a certain set of therapeutic
substances. Of course, the notion that tools articulate, rather than simply
reveal, different corporeal entities and behaviors is easier to accept when
the substances appearing in these interactions are no longer held to be
5. Hacking 1983: 230.

6. Latour 2004.
real. Nevertheless, the specific contours of any somatic behavior change

with each set of technologies used to render it visible.7 As such, over the
course of classical antiquity, what was “manifest” [φαινόμενα] changed
according to the shifting set of technologies that produced varying types
of visibility. Different concepts of corporeality relied on different tools.
Different tools displayed different bodies.
Along with these two vectors, a third remains: tracking the use of spe-
cific tools as heuristic analogies for individual body parts. What counts
as “observable” is often very hazy, especially in ancient science.8 More
often than not, scholars react to what seems to be an astonishing blind-
ness to certain corporeal features, asserting that ancient authors surely
knew about such obvious physical behaviors as the pulse or respiration,
mentioned above, and surely must have known about the vital role of the
lungs or the heart. After all, people could have held up an ear to their chest
and must have seen the rise and fall of the chest cavity during breath-
ing. Moreover, animals were cut apart all the time in sacrifice, and butch-
ers would have an intimate knowledge of the inner animal parts. Yet this
book demonstrates that even ideas about basic somatic behaviors were
assembled from a tangled web of theoretical commitments, medical ob-
servations, and in many cases, technological comparanda. In this regard,
the phenomena described in medical treatises were always assembled
from various places. It is because of this distinction that technologies can
have a substantial impact on ideas about corporeal behaviors and pro-
cesses, not least because of how technological environments can shape
assumptions about what is possible and what is natural. To illustrate this
dynamic, this book tracks the impact of water-delivery technologies and
pneumatics on theories of respiration and the vascular system. Authors
from Empedocles to Galen used devices such as the clepsydra wine server,
the bellows, the force pump, pipes, and aqueducts to conceptualize the
corporeal interior. As these technologies developed, theories changed
accordingly, as did basic observations about the body’s behaviors. Tak-
ing this approach reveals that even a formulation as simple as “the chest
rises when we breathe in” surfaced through negotiation with technologi-
cal comparisons and physical theories. Accordingly, this third vector will
7. See Kuriyama (1999), who illustrated the various ways that “the pulse” was
construed as a phenomenon within Greek and Chinese medical approaches. For
Greek authors such as Herophilus, the pulse was a singular action located in the
arteries, while for Chinese physicians, the pulse manifested in disparate ways in
different parts of the body depending on the state of health or illness.
8. Lehoux (2012) examines this point well.
emphasize how consequential ancient technological environments were

for constructing basic corporeal assumptions and how shifts in these en-
vironments from the fifth century BCE to the second century CE contrib-
uted to changes in medical explanations.
The entanglement of these three vectors—structural, investigative, and
analogical—reveals the deep interconnections between tools and bodies
within ancient medical discourses and situates the question of technology
at the heart of many Greek and Roman medical theories, beginning with
the Hippocratics in the fifth century BCE and extending to Galen in the
second century CE and beyond. This multilayered approach is necessary
because countenancing the hybridity of investigative and observational
techniques reveals how composite an object the body actually is, as each
medical theorist created new corporeal configurations as objects of in
quiry.9 To be sure, ancient physicians paid close attention to real bodies
that responded in physically determined ways, but “the body” discussed
in each medical explanation cannot be considered identical or cotermi-
nous with these physical things. Medical theories explain conglomerate
entities pulled together from exemplars both human and nonhuman, liv-
ing and nonliving, that were viewed in different ways and articulated with
different tools. This book explores how these multiple objects and ob-
servations transform into a single phenomenon. It attends to the messy
business of making the objects of medical explanation and the tools used
to complete this task.10
Part of this claim rests on the insistence that “the body” upon which
medical theorists trained their intellectual focus is not a singular, stable
physical object waiting to be witnessed by more acute viewers and com-
prehended by more accurate explanations.11 On a basic epistemological
level, objects of scientific comprehension are always assembled through
multiple exemplars or are compiled from multiple cases of what is
9. See also Holmes 2010a, which tracks medical constructions of the body as
the recipient of technical expertise.
10. In many ways, this threefold investigation therefore has much in common
with the work of Mol (2002), whose anthropology of atherosclerosis examined
how a patient experienced disease by privileging practices rather than theories.
She notes that as a consequence of this approach, the phenomena under ques-
tion start to fragment into multiple objects.
11. In this approach I follow Holmes (2010b), who calls the body a “conceptual
object” (see esp. 18–19) following Rheinberger’s discussion of “epistemic things”
(1997: 11–23, 28–31); cf. Holmes 2010a: 84, which distinguishes between bodies as
physical objects and “the body that emerges in the classical period as the object
of expert knowledge and care.”
deemed to be a single phenomenon. Determining what counts as a rele-

vant observation in these contexts thus requires discrimination and se-
lection. Theorists must choose what types of bodies count as informative
(animals/humans, male/female/intersex, old/young, idealized/disabled,
racialized, etc.), how many individual bodies to examine, what behaviors
to include, in which ways they are to be observed or manipulated, whose
reports can be trusted, and so on. The phenomena being explained there-
fore emerge from the apparatus that reflects these decisions, and a sin-
gular epistemic object such as “the body” is compiled from heterogenous
elements. Different somatic behaviors and corporeal features are made
visible by different technical means. In other words, the epistemic ob-
ject of inquiry emerges only through its interactions with certain tools,
skillsets, and larger intellectual apparatuses,12 such that the body and the
behaviors that it displays are the emergent properties of the explanatory
apparatus that articulates it. Understanding how technologies impacted
ancient medical theories therefore requires examining the dynamics of
how these interfaces manifested corporeal phenomena and how these in-
terfaces changed over time.
0.2 Teleology, Mechanism, V i talism,

and Tec hnology
In some regards, the history of the organism can be seen as the introduc-
tion of teleology into accounts of the human whole. Indeed, when schol-
ars have attended to how functional accounts of the body developed, they
have generally done so through the lens of teleology, using this concept
to ground their analysis of how authors attributed intrinsic goals and pur-
poses to natural objects. The problem with merging the history of the
organism with the history of teleology, however, is that the latter can de-
note many different relationships.13 Teleology can be of the cosmic type,
12. Latour 2004.

13. The bibliography on teleology in ancient philosophy is extensive, although
most of it focuses on Plato, Aristotle, and Galen because of the importance the
concept plays for each of these thinkers. For Plato, most scholarship focuses on
the external, cosmic teleology imposed by a divine demiurge on the world, which
Lennox (1985) called “unnatural teleology,” and the relationship it bears to eter-
nal forms and material necessity (see, e.g., Balme 1987; Johansen 2004: 69–116;
Scolnicov 2017). Since teleology and “final causes” play such an important part in
Aristotle’s metaphysics, physics, and biology, the bibliography extends even fur-
ther, although two key discourses surround how teleology structures his account
of living creatures (see, e.g., Gotthelf 1976; 1985; 2012; Lennox 1982; Gelber 2021)
wherein some divine figure arranges the world to certain purposes. In

turn, this description itself can imply several meanings, including that
God preordains every single event within some totalizing plan, that Na-
ture assigns each species some role in a broader natural order, or that
an Intelligent Designer has arranged some, but not all, features of the
world toward particular ends. Yet teleology can also operate internally
and immanently as well, implying that individuals should each seek to
fulfill their own unique purpose in life, that each species possesses some
innate mode of flourishing, or that animals all behave in certain ways
because of respective inborn characters.14 In addition, teleology can de-
scribe the operation of innate forces in matter, whether to guide nonliving
substances to their proper places in the cosmos, initiate and direct growth
in an embryo, or orient and compel the living body toward health. All
these teleologies have nuances in turn and do not exhaust the way that
“purpose” or “goals” can describe actions, configure the world, or struc-
ture its objects. Accordingly, rather than orient this investigation toward
teleology, which might then bend our eyes to mythological cosmologies,
Anaxagoras’s Mind, Empedocles’s Love, or theological reflections on di-
vine design, it is more productive to establish the history of the organism
on the emergence of a particular type of internal orientation—namely,
the tool-like structural teleology that construed the body as composed of
organa that each fulfilled some function. This tool-like teleology created
an entity that “worked,” insofar as its component pieces each completed
and whether he believed the cosmos as a whole was teleologically arranged such
that individuals and regular natural phenomena served both internal and exter-
nal goals (see Cooper 1982: 217; 1987; Furley 1985; Sedley 1991; 2007, esp. 194–203;
Charles 1991; Wardy 1993; Sharples 2017). For general accounts of Aristotelian te-
leology, see also Johnson (2005) and Leunissen (2010). More recently, Rocca (2017)
has edited a volume wherein teleology is discussed with a slightly wider frame,
a discussion that shows how the term can be deployed in both highly specific
technical contexts and diffuse broader modes. For example, contributors speak
about teleology as benevolent creationism (Sedley 2017; cf. Sedley 2007), atempo-
ral mathematical structure (Scolnicov 2017), Nous-arrangement of the world and
its names (Tarrant 2017), arrangement to what is either necessary or merely for
the better (Leunissen 2017; cf. Leunissen 2010), or a simple normative biological
nature (Craik 2017).
14. It is common to distinguish between two types of teleology, one variously
referred to as cosmic/external/intentional/unnatural and another described as
individual/immanent/nonintentional/natural. This division is consequential
largely insofar as scholars associate the former with Plato and the latter with
Aristotle. See, for example, Lennox 2001; Ariew 2002: 8; Sedley 2010; Rocca 2017.
an individuated task. Understanding the physiology of such an object re-

quired knowing what each part did and what purpose [τέλος] it served.
To be sure, the emergence of structural, tool-like teleology cannot be
divorced from the development of external, cosmic teleology, since the
two historically arose together. Nevertheless, the two concepts cannot be
collapsed. This book thus follows how ancient teleological biologies were
built upon the model of tools. Such an analytic frame helps uncover the
complicated role that technologies played in conceptualizing bodies and
their components.
As these reflections on teleology suggest, even as this book proposes
a new framework for assessing the interactions of technologies and the
body in antiquity, it joins a longer legacy of scholars assessing the rela-
tionship between the artificial and the natural in ancient scientific dis-
course. One important thread of such scholarship evaluates whether an-
cient accounts of living things are “mechanistic” or “vitalist.” Charles
Wolfe has outlined how discourses within seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century iatromechanism established two opposing modalities with which
to explain biotic phenomena. On the one hand, the iatromechanists ad-
opted “mechanistic” accounts that explained biotic behaviors solely with
recourse to generic physical forces, such that living things abide by the
same laws of matter as nonliving entities. On the other hand, “vitalist”
arguments, culminating with the Montpellier school, attributed suppos-
edly unique capacities to living tissues that abiotic substances do not pos-
sess, including an orientation toward the living whole irreducible to basic
physical properties.15 In this regard, living tissues possessed their own
powers that could not be reproduced through technical ingenuity, even
hypothetically. A mechanist might therefore explain the seemingly self-
guided growth of an embryo by claiming that matter adheres to its inner
structures by becoming enmeshed by some physical entanglement as it
flows through its tissues. A vitalist might explain this same phenomenon
by claiming that living tissues possess a special capacity to attract what
they need at any given time, relative to the needs of the whole. For a vi-
talist, living things grow, whereas nonliving things merely accumulate in
piles, while for a mechanist, nothing ontologically distinguishes living
from nonliving entities.
Although Wolfe illustrates that these tidy divisions seldom remained
unblurred in practice, the categories have proven attractive to scholars
looking to interrogate what forces are at work inside living things. For ex-
ample, scholars such as Iain Lonie have employed these basic categories
15. Wolfe 2021.

to assess ancient medical theories, asking whether certain Hippocratic

authors propose explanations of one type or another.16 Sylvia Berryman
maintains the same categories but avoids an ahistorical rendering of them,
instead asking whether and how ancient mechanics itself influenced theo-
ries of natural objects.17 Jean De Groot applies a similar logic, arguing that
ancient mechanical principles shaped Aristotle’s account of animal mo-
tion in particular.18 These investigations are often successful on their own
terms, but they spend considerable time adjudicating boundary disputes
between the living and the artificial which are sometimes not present in
ancient sources.19 Moreover, as a corollary effect, adopting the mechanist/
vitalist frame can occlude certain ways that technologies influenced the-
ories of the body, since this division arranges artificial technologies such
as machines and tools on one side while placing biotic, natural things
such as plants and animal tissues on the other. Such a dichotomy lever-
ages the fact that gears and machines still operate as paradigmatic tech-
nological devices within modern imaginations (even as digital products
are displacing this dominance), but it ignores the fact that living things
and technologies are not completely separate sets. Rather, the vast ma-
jority of tools applied to human bodies, including drugs, foodstuffs, and
other therapeutic tools, are made from biotic substances. Addressing how
technologies and bodies interacted within medical theories thus requires
adopting a definition of technology that does not restrict itself to mechan-
ics and mechanistic devices alone.
The term “technology” has undergone a dramatic shift in common En-
glish parlance in the last decade, becoming ever more associated with dig-
ital tools and computer-based industries. The general usage of the term
now privileges novelty and complexity, so that yesterday’s technologies
transform into today’s infrastructure. Such semantic flux makes establish-
ing an operational definition all the more necessary, and yet the attempts
16. Lonie 1981a; 1981b.

17. Berryman 2009; cf. Berryman 2002b and 2003. See also von Staden (1995;
1996; 1998; 2007), who examines the interactions of pneumatics, mechanics, and
medicine.
18. De Groot 2014; cf. de Groot 2008.
19. By contrast, Mayor (2018) traces many Greek and Roman myths in which
ancient craftsmen, divine or otherwise, constructed living creatures through
technical means, although she does so without attending to the distinction be-
tween accounts involving a divinely imbued capacity for self-motion and those
that present a living thing as a machine operating according to materially com-
prehensible forces.
to define technology have been astonishingly varied.20 While continental

European languages still treat “technology” as the science of applied arts,
modern English references to “technology” tend to refer to the material
products produced by these activities.21 This book uses both definitions
but highlights the latter, on the grounds that understanding how tech-
nologies structured ideas about the body in antiquity requires examining
actual material tools. It therefore places considerable emphasis on sub-
stances, instruments, and artifacts themselves. That is, it treats technol-
ogies both as specialized knowledge sets and as the objects produced by
the application of such expertise.22 Technologies therefore include ham-
mers, shovels, scalpels, cement, paper, glass, cranes, boats, and siege en-
gines, but they also include human-transformed substances employed for
some purpose, such as plant-based drugs, wine, beer, foods, and timber.
Although this expanded definition of technology does not come directly
from ancient actors’ categories, employing it allows us to include mate-
rial developments in mechanics alongside shifts in drug production and
scientific implements. All of these phenomena were crucial in articulating
different theories of the body and different types of corporeality. Under-
standing how technical products and bodies interacted in ancient medi-
cal discourses requires analyzing these substances, too.
An emphasis on the materiality of technologies also helps overcome an
obstacle faced by using ancient categories as the sole analytic framework
for this investigation. Many scholars examining the interaction of tech
nology and living things in Greek and Roman antiquity ground their anal-
ysis philologically, scrutinizing the shifting definitions of the terms techne
and physis. Heinrich von Staden, for instance, has outlined the agonistic
20. See Schatzberg (2006 and 2018) for an overview of the term and its uses in
philosophical, industrial, and sociological contexts.
21. Schatzberg (2018) traces these semantic uses to the appearance of the term
technologia in Latin in the sixteenth century, where it denoted a logos, or system-
atic account, of a techne, or technical discipline. He argues that the extension of
the semantic range to include technically produced objects emerged at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century under the influence of German discourses about
Technik, which described the material methods and tools involved in the indus-
trial arts. Yet Technik, along with the French technique or Italian tecnica, can also
refer to systematized skills and methods (which thus correspond more closely to
the English technique), even though all these words are more commonly rendered
into English as “technology” by modern translators. Such difficulties make a clear
linguistic or etymological analysis difficult to conduct and restricted in value.
22. See Franssen, Lokhorst, and van de Poel (2018) for philosophical accounts
of the metaphysics surrounding such artifacts.
relationship between these two concepts in certain Hippocratic treatises,

as authors employ their techne to force nature to reveal itself, while he
also shows how other medical authors characterized a more complemen-
tary relationship between medicine and nature.23 More recently, Maria
Gerolemou has conducted an even wider analysis of these terms, examin-
ing how nature acts as an inspiration for technical reproduction of animal
motion, exploring techne and physis within Homer, Hesiod, Greek tragedy,
and beyond.24 Multiple scholars have explored the polarity of these two
fields in other contexts.25 Although this philological approach can pro-
vide insight into how individual authors balance these perpetually paired
terms, acknowledging the materiality of technologies helps connect bod-
ies with the tools that articulated them both conceptually and physically.
Moving beyond a semantic approach to techne also helps avoid another
potential tautology. Since medicine is itself a techne that developed and
applied various therapeutic techniques, the history of medicine can be
written as the application of different technologies to the human form.
Such an approach occludes a full grasp of how tools interacted with bod-
ies at both a physical and an abstract level. That full grasp requires seeing
technologies as more than systems of knowledge, but also as actual ob-
jects and substances, created through human intervention and artifice.
0.3 A nalogies, Metaphors, and M odels
If artifacts provide one pillar of this study, comparison supplies the other.
As Geoffrey Lloyd has illustrated, analogical arguments played a particu-
larly strong role in ancient science, and comparison was one of the main
techniques through which Greek and Latin theorists constructed expla-
nations.26 While this study does not set as its primary aim the elucida-
tion of how different scientific traditions or different authors employed
metaphors and analogies (or how these argumentative techniques related
to other literary disciplines in antiquity), analogies do offer a powerful
way to track the conceptual effect that developing technologies had on
23. Von Staden 2007.

24. Gerolemou, 2023.
25. See especially the contributions in Bensaude-Vincent and Newman (2007).
Two forthcoming volumes will also continue to investigate the mirroring and
intermingling of living and technical objects; see Gerolemou and Kazantzidis,
2023, and Gerolemou, Ruffell, and Burr, forthcoming.
26. Lloyd 1966; cf. Lloyd 2015.
ancient medical assumptions. Comparison is one of the main ways that

tools for doing can become tools for thinking, and one of the primary
ways in which authors integrated tools into their articulations of natural
phenomena.
Over the last sixty years there has been a tremendous amount written
about metaphors, analogies, and models and their use in both philosophy
and science (as well as an increasing literature in cognitive science).27 The
greatest number of contributions have been attempts to rehabilitate these
comparative modalities in the face of an analytic and empirical tradition
that sought to rid science of the ambiguity and uncertainty inherent in
comparisons.28 Mary Hesse, in her seminal 1963 book Models and Analo-
gies in Science, argued for the essential predictive function that compari-
son performs in theory formation. As part of her analysis, she argues that
each comparison includes positive analogies (i.e., comparable relations
that are present in both systems), negative analogies (i.e., comparable re-
lations that are present in one but not the other system) and neutral anal-
ogies (i.e., comparable relations that may or may not be present in both
systems). For instance, we can think of modeling the atom on the solar
system. A positive analogy might be that both systems include a central
mass surrounded by smaller, orbiting entities. A negative analogy might
be that although the planets have color, electrons do not. A neutral anal-
ogy might be that planets have elliptical orbits and are kept in them by a
force that the central mass exerts. Although these resemblances may or
may not turn out to be true, it will originally be unclear whether these par-
ticular similarities hold. Hesse emphasizes that neutral analogies there-
fore provide a valuable and essential heuristic role in science, since they
present hypotheses that can then be independently tested to determine
which falls into the positive and which into the negative category.29 Analo-
gies can translate theories into predictions. Most philosophers of science
arguing for the importance of models in science suggest something sim-
ilar, stressing the heuristic role they play, whether only in the context of
27. Kövecses (2010) provides an overview of metaphor that incorporates much

of the relevant scholarship.
28. Although Francis Bacon denigrated imagery in the sixteenth century and
Boyle and Hooke rejected misleading images in the seventeenth, Pierre Duhem
may have configured the modern distrust of comparisons in science by rejecting
even mechanical models of phenomena and instead looking to model science on
axiomatic-deductive logic (1906, esp. ch. 5); cf. Draaisma 2000: 53–55.
29. Similar sentiments can be found in Black (1962: 223).
discovery or in the application of generalized laws into individual instan-

tiations.30
The problem with accepting Hesse’s analysis for understanding an-
cient science is that authors in antiquity generally did not test the hy-
pothetical claims predicted by analogies with independent empirical
experiment. Instead, the analogies and models were themselves the argu-
mentative support for physical claims. Consequently, any neat distinc-
tions between positive, negative, and neutral resemblances evaporate
such that making these evaluations relies on the arguments and assump-
tions of the author and audience. Yet analogies were used for more than
a single purpose within scientific treatises and could be employed for
both embellishment31 and assurance,32 as well as having didactic33 and
heuristic functions.34 It is necessary to keep these varying roles in mind,
30. For contemporary interest in how analogies can function as heuristic

models in science, see Frigg and Hartmann 2020, especially section 1, which sup-
plies a relevant bibliography.
31. I define embellishment analogies as the comparisons often (dismissively)
associated with literary, poetic, and rhetorical concerns. These comparisons seek
to make the target system more vivid while highlighting certain relevant fea-
tures, but they do not imply a specific causal mechanics. For instance, an em-
bellishment analogy might claim, “lightning flashes like a sword glinting in the
moonlight,” even as the author attributes lightning to a stream of fire surging
downward, not a reflection on a metallic surface.
32. Assurance analogies are comparisons that support how an entity can enact
a particular physical behavior by pointing to other instances where such behavior
occurs (in this regard, they overlap with comparative examples). In these compar-
isons the analogue and its target system generally display so little resemblance
that it is hard to imagine the author intended the analogue to represent any iso-
morphic physical mechanics, although it cannot always be ruled out. Regardless,
these comparisons primarily function to guarantee the validity of certain physi-
cal claims. For example, an assurance analogy might claim, “the cupping vessel
draws flesh into its hollow, just as a magnet pulls fillings toward itself.”
33. Didactic analogies are comparisons that reveal the physical mechanics of
a target system, but only up to some determinate point. In this regard they can
be useful teaching aids, while any unwanted implications are kept separate from
the theory which they seek to make clear. Didactic analogies are therefore often
accompanied by boundary work to specify where the comparison fails. Some-
times, however, it is up to the reader to determine when the comparison stops
becoming useful or starts to misrepresent the author’s position. For instance, a
didactic analogy might claim, “the body is like a house, with each chamber des-
ignated for a certain purpose.”
34. Like didactic analogies, heuristic analogies provide sufficient resemblance
as to provide a potential physical correlate for the target system, but it is unclear
since doing so prevents us conflating the purpose of all comparisons in

all ancient scientific contexts.35 Nevertheless, the trouble with outlining
these types is that they are no more than useful fictions, especially since,
unless they are explicitly framed by a declaration of purpose, we can only
adjudicate which functions these comparisons play based on clues in the
text and our basic intuition. Analogic types exist on a spectrum of resem-
blance, with only potential authorial instruction and contested degrees of
isomorphism separating the categories. Part of the argumentative strat-
egy of this study is therefore to acknowledge the slipperiness of these cat-
egories and track how even comparisons that authors endeavor to limit
can still produce unintended conceptual consequences. In other words,
embellishment, assurance, didacticism, and discovery coexist, sometimes
in the same comparison itself. Recognizing the porousness of these cat-
egories can help us see how analogies can perform multiple functions
in ancient scientific arguments, sometimes for different readers, some-
times simultaneously, and sometimes despite any authorial declarations
and delineations.
Analogic models do not simply present potentially testable correspon-
dence; they direct our attention in certain directions, thereby excluding
potentially troublesome information and occluding certain details as ir-
relevant. As Max Black states, a comparison “selects, emphasizes, sup-
presses, and organizes features of the principal subject.”36 We can call this
implicit act of selection cognitive focus. The aspects of the phenomenon
around the boundaries are neither completely invisible nor cut off entirely;
they are simply blurry and demand little regard relative to the points on
which our attention has been trained. For instance, we may think about
where heuristic comparisons fail, or whether a high level of similarity exists.

In this, they supply greater explanatory opportunity, since heuristic analogies
supply otherwise inaccessible possibilities and can carry predictive force. An ex-
ample of a heuristic analogy might be “thunder occurs when the hollow clouds
burst, just like an inflated bladder popping.” These heuristics are more or less
identical to analogic models, and the two terms can be used more or less inter-
changeably in the context of ancient science.
35. Since I am interested in generalized types, I omit perhaps the most system-
atic use of analogy in ancient science: the formalized biological analogies that ap-
pear in Aristotle’s biological treatises, notably Historia Animalia and Parts of Ani-
mals. In these texts, Aristotle attempts to systematize animate creatures by means
of analogic relationships between functional parts, e.g., lungs : mammal :: gills :
fish. Since they are bound to Aristotle’s particular interest in teleological causal-
ity, these analogies are not universally employed in ancient scientific systems.
36. Black 1962: 44–45. He is here speaking about metaphors, but his analysis
later extends to scientific models.
the brain’s “hardware” and “software” without asking whether it requires

periodic “updates.” And yet a marginalized feature such as updating can
be made active simply by readjusting our focus—this is precisely why heu-
ristic analogies can generate novel and successful scientific ideas. Using
a comparison to create a heuristic model is thus both a creative and de-
structive act, producing new and potentially significant links, while ex-
cluding or at least obscuring other possibilities. It directs attention to a
small number of details, ignoring other aspects of the phenomenon, both
physical and functional.
As Jacques Derrida argues in “White Mythology,” philosophical at-
tempts to avoid metaphorical usage only uncover another layer of meta-
phors, and even the very concept of the “literal” or the etymon bases itself
on metaphors of effacement and exclusion.37 Philosophy itself, he argues,
is in fact enabled by and generated in metaphor. Related claims have also
been made for many years by psychologists and cognitive scientists, who
have increasingly acknowledged the crucial role that analogical thinking
plays in how we conceptualize and comprehend phenomena. Rather than
seeing analogies and metaphors as mere teaching aids or artistic flour-
ishes, researchers have argued that comparisons help make conceptual
bridges between seemingly disparate fields, while also providing the very
mechanism that allows us to categorize objects in the first place.38 Lakoff
and Johnson push this idea even further, articulating a number of sim-
ple “conceptual” metaphors that are rooted in basic corporeal experience
(high/low or warm/cold as good/bad, etc.). These, they argue, underpin
whole systems of language.39 More recently, Hofstadter and Sander have
gone so far as to claim that analogies are “the fuel and fire of thinking,”
or, in stronger terms, “thought’s core.”40
37. Derrida 1974.

38. Foucault (1970) discusses the historical construction and classifications
of natural kinds through resemblance and comparison (see esp. ch. 1–5); cf.
Bowker and Star (1999), who also examine how classification functions through
arbitrated similarities.
39. Lakoff and Johnson 1980. They also tie these conceptual metaphors to
embodied experience (i.e., privileging human orientation, so that the human
embodied experience of up/down underpins the metaphorical correlation with
happy/sad).
40. Hofstadter and Sander 2013: 3, 18. Many other works have focused on the
importance of analogies in cognition, notably the seminal discussions of Black
(1962) and Ricoeur (1978). For various discussions concerning the use of analogies
in science, see the early contributions of Oppenheimer (1956), Hesse (1966), Kuhn
(1979), Gentner (1982), Gentner and Clement (1988), and Gentner and Jeziorski
We need not accept a poststructuralist account of language or accept

that analogy is the foundation of cognition to recognize that analogic
models do not have sharp boundaries where the comparison stops and
the literal begins (indeed, that is why analytic philosophers have gone to
so much work to locate or create such borders). This fuzziness is espe-
cially true in the context of ancient science. In fact, assumptions derived
from comparisons often become so naturalized that they lose their status
as metaphors and models. For example, in ancient treatises, digestion,
fermentation, and ripening are all described by the same word: pepsis
[πέψις], or “cooking.” This basic categorization often attends ancient as-
sumptions that heat must be involved in all four processes.41 Yet rarely
do ancient authors acknowledge that these processes are metaphorically
linked, understood by an implicit comparison. By contrast, we presume
that one of these words, “cooking,” is the primary use of this term (i.e.,
the tenor), while others, such as “digestion” or “ripening,” are the com-
parative targets (i.e., the vehicles), rather than allowing for the possibility
that some Greeks might simply have considered all these activities to be
instances of the same phenomena and thus represent no metaphor at all.
So many of our assumptions about the natural world come from ba-
sic technological behaviors that it is often difficult to discern where our
assumptions come from in the first place. We cannot isolate or quaran-
tine analogy so neatly, since comparisons provide structural frameworks
through which we understand and explain the world. When looking for
the impact that technologies had on scientific theories in antiquity, we
must therefore start with explicit analogic models but can then examine
whether these assumptions appear without any analogic justification,
naturalized and transformed into frictionless assertions about the world.
Indeed, sometimes technological models are tacit, active, and influential
without being explicitly invoked, since they have worked their way down
into our basic beliefs about the world and its operations.
(1989). For a discussion about metaphors in ancient science, see Pender 2003. I
am particularly indebted to Black’s “interactive” view of metaphor, which dis-
cusses how metaphors and analogies can organize our conceptions (see esp.
Black 1962, ch. 4), and Ricoeur’s emphasis on the “predicative” force of analo-
gies, which creates meaning in the interaction of two terms, rather than via the
substitution of one for another.
41. See Lloyd 1996: 83–103 for a fuller explication of this concept within Aristo-
telian biology; cf. Jouanna 1999: 314, 320. The verb πέσσειν can also refer to fruit
ripening (cf. Totelin 2009: 148–49) or embryological maturation (cf. Arist. Hist. an.
6.2, 560b17–18; 6.4, 562b19; 6.7, 564a2; see Lehoux 2017 for a discussion of embryol-
ogy and spontaneous generation, both of which involve “concoction”).
0.4 Chapter Overview
Ancient theories were built in worlds composed of objects, implements,

and certain material realities, and these environments shifted dramati-
cally from the fifth century BCE to the second century CE (and beyond).
The following chapters thus trace how these changing technological land-
scapes facilitated new theories of the body and its operations, while also
showing how new theories of the body produced and were sustained by
new sets of tools. Sometimes these new tools were technologies that di-
rectly intervened in corporeal processes, while at other times they were
used as cognitive models for the corporeal interior. Since these issues are
interdependent—tools do not supply easy models for corporeal functions
if theorists do not think the parts function in the first place—the chapters
will proceed chronologically rather than thematically, revealing how these
interwoven ideas changed together over time.
Chapter 1 will discuss early Greek medicine of the fifth and early fourth
centuries BCE, examining how Hippocratic authors used gruels, purga-
tive drugs, and cupping glasses to understand the nature of the corporeal
interior. It will show how these technologies formed recursive interfaces
with the very bodies that they revealed, acting as physical and concep-
tual extensions of the body’s essential substances and ideal composition.
For instance, the author of Ancient Medicine considers the flavors in foods
administered by the physician to be the literal substances balanced in
the body, and the consistency of his ideal medicalized comestible—barley
gruel—was thought to be the ideal composition of a healthy body. By con-
trast, Nature of the Human put forward a slightly different theory, this time
using purgative drugs to make the four inner humors manifest to the the-
oretical eye. As with Ancient Medicine, the therapeutics overlap with the
corporeal theories, insofar as an emblematic form of these emetic drugs
resembles the pathological substance that they supposedly pulled from
the body. Other treatises, such as Diseases 4, privileged a wider array of
therapeutic technologies that included material instruments along with
food and drugs, and this orientation mirrors the greater emphasis this
treatise places on structures and their mechanisms within the body. This
same tendency once again occurs in Hippocratic gynecological treatises,
which argue that women’s bodies are essentially different from men’s in-
sofar as they are wetter and need to purge this excess moisture through
menstruation. In this light, the author of Diseases of Women 1 compares
female flesh to wool, before going on to use wool as the primary vehi-
cle for vaginal and uterine pessaries where irritating substances are in-
troduced as emmenagogues to induce menstruation. In short, different
Hippocratic authors privilege different therapeutic technologies as their

primary investigative tools, and these discrepancies align with divergent
theories of the body.
Chapter 2 will start by returning to the fifth century BCE to look at a
parallel development in theories of corporeality. It starts with a prehistory
of organs in the pre-Socratic physikoi, who largely ignore the body as a con-
ceptual unity until Empedocles begins to explain certain corporeal fea-
tures such as breathing. He does so with a tool called the clepsydra, which
had already become a totemic technology for understanding the power of
air and the void. His account is remarkable insofar as it maps quite poorly
onto human anatomy as it is now understood, implying that we breathe
through both our nose and our skin and that air is drawn inward through
the advance and retreat of blood within our body. This chapter argues that
this is no mistaken interpretation but reveals how corporeal processes
had yet to be housed in individual parts. In this regard, the clepsydra
analogy came first and subsequently helped facilitate the idea in later au-
thors that individual “organs” were responsible for corporeal functions.
Indeed, the second part of the chapter turns to Plato, who adopts features
of Empedocles’s account in his own theory of respiration, which appears
within his cosmogonic account in the Timaeus. It emphasizes that Plato
was the first to call the interior parts organa and that doing so was crucial
to his broader teleological view of the world as crafted by a divine demi-
urge. Yet Plato’s version of the organism remains different from our own,
insofar as it is oriented toward rationality, not life, as its highest purpose.
The chapter ends by examining how this theory of respiration fits with an
accompanying account of blood distribution in the body, an account that
seems to reflect contemporary irrigation technologies of the fourth cen-
tury BCE. It weaves together the structural, tool-like teleology that came
with a cosmic creator and the ways in which the surrounding technologi-
cal environment shaped the features and behaviors attributed to this new
epistemic object.
Chapter 3 examines how Aristotle adopted tool-like teleology as the
foundation of his biological research program, which attempted to out-
line a teleology of difference that explained why the parts of each animal
were suited to their own particular lifestyle and how changes in one part
would be balanced by alterations in others. This approach foregrounded
parts and organs as crucial divisions within the body and made anatomy a
privileged investigative practice. Moreover, he arranged the parts and their
operations around a new goal: the maintenance of life. His interest in ex-
plaining how this organized body worked promoted what we might now
term “physiology,” insofar as he described both the function and mecha-
nism of corporeal tasks. He thus merged form and function within indi-
viduated organs, and in so doing articulated a new theory of the body. The
remainder of the chapter examines some of these mechanisms, including
pulsation, respiration, and blood delivery, to illustrate the complex role
that tool analogies played in his theories. They were not determinative,
but neither were they inconsequential, and they could smooth the edges
between the different demands of various corporeal tasks. The final sec-
tion of the chapter extends this analysis to the way that automata feature
in his account of animal motion to argue that his assertion that sinews,
not muscles, provided the generative force relies on assumptions derived
from the use of these animal tissues in motion-generative machines.
Chapter 4 will follow the rise of anatomical practices in the Hellenistic
era and look at how they supported a mode of corporeality that placed
emphasis on tool-like parts and their activities. It shows how vessels, for-
merly passive channels, were assigned active functional roles, as the orga-
nization of the body spread to multiple parts and structures. Although
this chapter highlights this broader trend, it spends more time with
Herophilus and Erasistratus as the two most important anatomists of the
era, both working in Ptolemaic Alexandria. This newly founded city saw
a swell of intellectual energy, which led to significant developments in
mathematics, lexicography, aesthetics, astronomy, mechanics, and pneu-
matics. Scholars have long identified some conceptual similarity between
Erasistratus’s model of the heart—which he takes to be a mechanism of
propulsion for the first time—and Ctesbius’s contemporary pneumatic
invention, the force pump. This chapter assesses these claims but argues
that the impact of these new devices moved beyond a single instance of
correspondence. Instead, it emphasizes that Erasistratus attributed dis-
ease to the “infiltration” of one substance (air or blood) into passageways
that contained the other and argues that this etiology reflects the opera-
tions of pneumatic devices performing marvelous tricks through the care-
fully calibrated separation of air and water into various chambers.
Chapter 4 examines these challenges to the organized body from the
second century BCE to first century CE. The success of the organism as
a conceptual object did not eliminate its detractors, who launched epis-
temological arguments against anatomy as a mode of knowing inner
corporeal activities. The Empiricists, Asclepiades of Bithynia, and the
Methodists all critiqued the physiological approach to medicine that the
organism had facilitated and presented their own rival forms of medi-
cal practice. Even though they did not foreground, or even include, func-
tional parts, their medical theories and their reception were still impacted
by their technological environment. Roman aqueducts and public baths
were now a crucial part of the sprawling infrastructure of empire. Not

only do certain features of Asclepiades’s theory about blockage and flow
in the body seem indebted to specifically Roman water technologies, but
his popularity can also be attributed in part to the comprehensibility of
his claims to a patient base that was now tending to health within bath-
ing complexes fed by aqueducts under constant threat of blockage. This
chapter stresses that technologies can create cultural heuristics and that
we should examine the reception of medical ideas with these environ-
ments in mind. The last section of the chapter returns to female bodies
to show how Soranus of Ephesus decoupled female corporeality from the
biotechnical interfaces of Hippocratic gynecology and used Methodism
to articulate women’s bodies instead. As a consequence, he accepted a
far wider range of menstrual volume and did not even see the absence of
menstruation as itself pathological. In this regard, this chapter examines
what the absence of certain technologies meant for theories of female
corporeality.
The sixth and final chapter tracks the resurgence of anatomical investi-
gations in the late first and early second centuries CE, when they appeared
in both public performances and the medical texts of Rufus of Ephesus.
With the return of anatomy came a greater interest in tool heuristics to
understand the body. This interest can be seen most clearly in the works
of Galen of Pergamon, who held that the body was a perfectly engineered
object, with each part playing a functional role. As part of his arguments,
Galen insists that each corporeal organ possess its own unique natural
capacity to perform its primary task for the body. These forces have of-
ten been described as “vitalist” powers, which commentators then con-
trast with the “mechanistic” forces at work in artificial instruments. This
chapter argues that instead of representing a step away from tool heuris-
tics, Galen’s vitalism follows logically from his assertion that the corpo-
real parts are tools responsible for certain somatic activities. Moreover, it
emphasizes that both the existence of natural faculties and their specific
properties are demonstrated by a series of technical interventions into an-
imal bodies. It therefore argues that these vivisection experiments enact
Galen’s vitalist powers, which cannot truly be separated from the tech-
nologies used to disclose them. Finally, it examines the specialized tools
required for these vivisections and notes that Galen implicitly establishes
himself as a demiurgic figure, one who reverse engineers the body that
Nature has built. The specialized tools that he designs to articulate the
body mirror the specialized parts that they reveal. In sum, all chapters
highlight the profound impact that tools and technologies had on Greek
and Roman theories of corporeality.
C h apte r On e
Hippocrates and
Technological Interfaces
1.0 Introduction
In the fifth century BCE, multiple Greek physicians began to write about
medicine and defend its practices as a principled and effective discipline,
designating it as an art, or techne. This development was certainly not
the birth of healing in the Mediterranean world and its environs. To the
south, Egyptian medical papyri attest to surgical care, gynecological treat-
ments, and general therapeutics from the early second millennium BCE
onward,1 while to the east, Assyro-Babylonian cuneiform tablets from the
eleventh century BCE list the sign sets used to determine which disease
assailed a sick person and which treatments to apply as a consequence.2
1. For overviews of Egyptian medical and the papyrological sources, see Strou-
hal, Vachala, and Vymazalová 2014 and Nunn 1996. In the eighth century BCE,
Homer casts Egypt as the homeland of the god of healing Asclepius, as well as
the source of powerful drugs (Od. 4.231–232). In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus
(Hist. 2.84.1) still marvels at Egypt as a place of medicine and medical knowledge;
cf. Theophr. Hist. pl. 9.15.1.
2. See Scurlock (2014). These medical documents align with broader semi-
ological practices that organize social and cosmic orders by means of a set of
predictive signs (cf. Rochberg 2016). For an overview of Babylonian medicine,
see Geller 2010 and Zucconi 2019: 15–56. Medicinal substances from both these
geographical locations appear in early Greek sources, which attests to some level
of interaction, and more connections between Egyptian, Assyro-Babylonian, and
Greek medicine continue to be uncovered. It has been difficult to locate specific
doctrinal influences that these traditions had on Greek medical notions, even if
broader intellectual tendencies can be found (see van der Eijk 2004a and 2004b).
Nevertheless, medicinal substances appear in Greece from both Egypt and the
territories of Assyro-Babylonian culture (see Totelin 2009: ch. 4), which suggests
ongoing interchange in the classical period, and more recent work has shown
the influence and interchange between medical cultures of the ancient world
(see Rumor 2016).
24 | C h a pt e r O n e
Within Greece itself, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey attest to the presence of
wound treatment and plague-fighting paeans around the eighth century
BCE,3 and there is evidence of an ongoing pharmacological tradition in
the centuries that followed,4 with funerary statues and inscriptions even
providing the names of a few Greek doctors from the sixth and early fifth
centuries.5 Nevertheless, the late fifth century BCE represents a major
watershed in the development of medicine as a self-conscious literary
discipline within Hellenic discourses. It was at this moment that Greek
medical authors started to define their principles and theories in writing
and defend their practices and methodologies in opposition to other tra-
ditions, notably magic and natural philosophy, even as they sometimes
adopted ideas and techniques from both these fields.
The major evidence for this early Greek medicine comes from the so-
called Hippocratic Corpus (or Collection), a group of approximately sixty
texts (depending on inclusions and text divisions), composed by various
authors but collected under the single moniker “Hippocrates” during the
Hellenistic period.6 The texts themselves display considerable diversity
in terms of style, content, purpose, and doctrine, with some treatises pre-
senting polished defenses of medicine, others detailing regimental and
gynecological practices, while yet others preserve what appear to be notes.
Many attempts, stemming back to antiquity, have been made to deter-
mine the “authentic” treatises of the historical Hippocrates,7 or, if not
3. Hom. Il. 1.473–474, 5.396–403, 5.899–904; Od. 19.455–459.

4. See Totelin 2009.
5. A marble statue from the sixth century BCE was found in Megara Hyblaea,
Sicily, with the inscription “Som[b]roditas, the doctor son of Mandrocles.” A mar-
ble disc, likely the lid of a funerary urn, found in Athens and dated to around
500 BCE, displays the inscription “wise skill of Aineios, best of doctors,” and a
copper tablet from 499–498 BCE or 477–475 BCE, found at Idalion in Cyprus, hon-
ors Onesilas and his brothers, all doctors, with a bilingual Cypriote/Greek text
detailing their service to Citium and their rewards. See Lane Fox 2020: 43–46 for
these references; cf. fig. 3 on p. 61.
6. Craik (2015) lists fifty-one treatises. Considerable controversy concerns the
date at which the Hippocratic Corpus was first collected. Although the current
grouping of texts did not appear together in the 1526 Aldine edition, there are
intimations that these treatises appeared in various clusters from as early as the
fourth century BCE. The strongest case can be made that the compilation of
these texts occurred within the bibliographic practices of Hellenistic Alexandria.
Jouanna (2018) presents a full textual history of the corpus, although Totelin
(2009: 4–5) and King (2020: 19–42) provide useful and concise overviews.
7. Hippocrates himself was reportedly born around 460 BCE on the island of
Cos in the eastern Aegean, where he is said to have founded a medical school. He
Hippocrates and Technological Interfaces | 25
that, to distinguish and group different “schools” of thought in the texts

(the so-called Coan and Cnidian).8 Most such approaches have been chal-
lenged and abandoned, so what we are left with are some relatively uncon-
troversial text groupings and some broadly accepted dates, with the bulk
of the treatises originating in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE.
Even with long-standing debates surrounding textual authenticity and
affiliations, there is wide consensus on a key doctrinal issue. That is, it is
all but common knowledge that the Hippocratic texts located the nature
of the body in its “humors” [χυμοί], “moistures” [ὑγροί], or other such con-
stitutive substances, sometimes simply called “the things that” [ἅ] com-
prise human nature. Blood, phlegm, and bile (both black and yellow) are
perhaps the best-known liquid candidates, but authors also proposed wa-
ter, breath, air, and fire. In recent years, scholars have given more weight
to how divergent these various Hippocratic theories can be, perhaps ex-
emplified by Philip van der Eijk’s suggestion that we abandon the col-
lective title “Hippocratic” altogether and instead simply speak about the
texts as representing “early Greek medicine.”9 Despite the increased ac-
knowledgment of theoretical diversity in the Corpus, less attention has
been given to differentiating Hippocratic authors’ individual therapeutic
practices. Because no treatise provides a full therapeutic manual, recon-
structing Hippocratic treatments requires drawing evidence from across
multiple texts. The therapeutic tool kit thus generated will include inter-
ventions into diet, exercise, sleep, and sexual activities, paired with the
application of drugs, enemas, fumigations, venesections, cauterizations,
joint relocations, bone settings, and a few instances (although not many)
of soft-tissue surgeries, with another major division between general care
and women’s reproductive care. To be sure, there are many shared strate-
gies and methods, even if nothing approaching a standard of care existed.
Nevertheless, this chapter emphasizes that Hippocratic authors privilege
different therapies in their writings, most notably when they describe
which tools are the most epistemologically valuable for revealing the na-
ture of the body. Tracking these varying therapeutic priorities can help
achieved notoriety as a physician within his own lifetime, providing the exam-
ple of the doctor par excellence for both Plato and Aristotle by at least the early
fourth century BCE (cf. Pl. Prt. 311b–c; Phdr. 270c–d; and Arist. Pol. 1326a15–16).
Beyond these accounts, biographical information remains apocryphal and highly
debated, but for full evidence, see Jouanna 1999; Craik 2015: xx–xxiv; Flashar 2016;
and Lane Fox 2020. For an overview of the “Hippocratic question” and why it has
been abandoned, see Lloyd 1975b and Craik 2018.
8. See Lonie 1965a, 1978a, and 1978b; Jouanna 1974; and Grensemann 1975.
9. Van der Eijk 2016.
reveal the intimate connection between developing medical technologies

and emerging Hippocratic notions of corporeality. As was outlined in the
introduction, different tools built different bodies.
It is difficult to stabilize the objects of scientific knowledge. Indeed, in
establishing medicine as a techne, early Greek physicians had to make the
body [σῶμα] and its “nature” [φύσις] their primary objects of expertise.10
As Brooke Holmes has revealed, doing so was no minor task. Prior Greek
healing practices had placed the patient in a network of relations between
themselves and divine actors, such that the etiology of corporeal afflic-
tions could lead either inward or outward, and often did both. By contrast,
the Hippocratic authors located the source of disease in the body itself
and, accordingly, needed to conceptualize and define corporeality as it
pertained to medicine.11 Yet the body’s opaque interior presented imme-
diate epistemological hurdles. We can neither see our insides nor directly
witness the dynamic corporeal processes that seem to take place under
the skin. Even if we could, visibility does not equate with comprehensibil-
ity, and the messy, oozy innards of an animal body do not disclose their
systematic relationships in any straightforward way. Hippocratic authors
therefore relied on various strategies to make our corporeal contours
manifest to the theoretical eye. Some strategies included producing philo-
sophically inflected arguments about first principles. Others involved cat-
aloging what we would call symptoms (although they are perhaps more
productively thought of as sign sets).12 Beyond passively watching the dis-
tressed body, however, or theorizing about its insides, early Greek physi-
cians also used active interventions to reveal what they thought was the
10. For Hippocratic use of the term “nature” and its variance, see Bourgey 1980
and Gallego Peréz 1996; cf. Craik 2017: 207. Von Staden (2007) notes that someone
or something’s physis is identified through a set of recurrent, stable characteris-
tics that can only be known via its dynamis or “power,” which itself can only be
known through its effects upon and reactions to other entities and substances;
cf. H. Miller 1952. Since physis is such a fundamental concept in Hippocratic med-
icine, but also a term that has incredible multivalence—as it can be used in the
context of the “nature” of the human body in general, an individual’s body, a
body part, an internal substance, an external substance, etc.—reflections upon
or discussions involving it are widespread; von Staden (2007: 43 n5) presents a
useful bibliography on the subject.
11. See Holmes 2010b, which deals with these developments at length and ex-
amines how these developments implicated corporeality within a broader ethics
of taking care of one’s own health. See also Holmes 2014 and 2018, which present
additional reflections both on this transformation and on the emergence of the
Hippocratic body as an epistemic object.
12. For the semiotic approach to inner states, see Art. 11.1–12.1 = 6.18–24L.
Hippocrates and Technological Interfaces | 27
essential nature of the human whole. There is evidence for some small de-
gree of animal dissection in the fifth century BCE (although very little for
human dissection), and this corresponded with an interest in mapping in-
terior corporeal topography. Nevertheless, the most powerful investigative
tool for Hippocratic authors was their own therapeutic techniques. Here,
technologies directly intervened in the body, which was then structured
around its reactions to these interventions. In short, Hippocratic theo-
ries were not simply abstract ideas or quasi-philosophical commitments.
They were ideas and explanations that were demonstrated with, crafted
alongside, and sustained by certain tools and practices. As a result, when
therapeutic technologies changed, so too did the physical substances and
conceptual objects they articulated.
As Heinrich von Staden has noted, many scholars have noted the mi-
metic relationship that Hippocratic authors establish between the techne
of medicine and the physis of humans.13 Authors can claim that “natures
are the physicians of disease” [νούσων φύσιες ἰητροί], as appears in Epi-
demics 6,14 or argue that all technai, medicine included, imitate aspects of
the body, as in Regimen.15 It is crucial to understand the material impli-
cations of such assertions. That is, mimesis often stretched beyond the
conceptual, insofar as many early therapeutic technologies were physi-
cally integrated into Hippocratic theories of corporeality, sometimes be-
ing treated as the actual components that composed our physis. At other
times, these therapeutic tools were affixed to the body, which then ab-
sorbed them as models of the very behaviors the tools aimed to treat. In
other words, Hippocratic authors articulated and built their epistemic ob-
ject in part through establishing therapeutic interfaces that often merged
the physical and conceptual. In this regard, Hippocratic corporeality de-
veloped in the interactions between these medical tool kits and the flesh
they aimed to treat. Yet to understand how these interfaces operated, and
how this blending of prosthesis and mimesis worked, it is first necessary
to understand some basic notions about how Hippocratic ideas about the
body differed from our own and how they went about articulating and as-
sembling the human whole.
13. See von Staden (2007), who analyzes both the ways that the medical techne
is seen as an extension of physis and the moments that the techne forces physis
to reveal or “confess” its secrets.
14. Hipp. Epid. 6.5.1 = 5.314L. For this author, physis can act to fend off illness
by stimulating tears, moisture in the nose, yawning, coughing, urination, etc.
15. Hipp. Vict. 1.11–12 = 6.486–488L might be emblematic in this regard. For a
discussion of these passages, see page 36–37.
1.1 Corp oreal Comp osition wi thout Organs
One striking feature of Hippocratic notions of corporeality is that their

body seems to lack a certain structural teleology that undermines our ba-
sic assumptions about what consolidates a living thing and makes it a
unified living entity.16 That is, modern explanations of the body tend to
start with our parts, which are then understood as enacting some function
for the operation of the living animal, and we understand bodies by ask-
ing how they “work.” Yet for Hippocratic authors functional parts barely
feature, if at all, in human physis. As mentioned above, early Greek phy-
sicians tended to describe corporeal liquids as the essential factors that
maintained health and produced disease. Even when authors disagreed
on what these liquids were, most still treated health as a homeostatic
balance of these substances that could be disturbed by either environ-
mental or behavioral factors. Authors placed far less emphasis on interior
structures, most often treating them as receptacles and reservoirs for the
moistures that flowed through and around them.17 As Beate Gundert has
demonstrated, there are many parts (ligaments, muscles, vessels, glands,
hollow spaces) that individual Hippocratic authors treat as serving some
function (closing the mouth, facilitating perception, creating the con-
ditions for sounds, voice, sight, etc.).18 Yet these references arise as off-
handed comments or are only inferred from pathological states, and rarely
are the viscera treated as functional components. Certainly, some authors
treat structures as more important than others do, but even these authors
do not foreground such parts when discussing the essential nature of the
body. For example, “the cavity” [ἡ κοιλίη] that provides the site of diges-
tion—so crucial within many Hippocratic systems of humoral and nutri-
tive balance—cannot be pinned to a single organ but instead operates as
the entire digestive tract, from stomach to rectum,19 and several Hippo-
16. Craik (2017) has recently written about the “incipient” teleology found in
Hippocratic texts. For where my stance differs, see note 31 on p. 32.
17. See Holmes (2014), who investigates these fluid dynamics relative to the
emergence of “sympathy” as a physical force within the body (and cosmos). See
also Joly (1966: 136), who describes the parts as passive and governed by “une
physique du récipient.”
18. Gundert (1992) catalogues the instances where Hippocratic treatises do
examine structures. Nevertheless, she agrees that fluids are still more directly
identified with the “nature” of humans.
19. For an overview of the semantic meaning of the term “cavity” [κοιλία], see
Bubb 2019: 131 n11.
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the foundation is a very good one, but as I have generally allowed
people to call me what they have pleased, and as there is nothing
necessarily dishonorable in this, I have never taken the pains to
dispute its application and propriety; and yet I confess that I am never
so spoken of without feeling a trifle uncomfortable—about as much so
as when I am called, as I sometimes am, the Rev. Frederick Douglass.
My stay in this legislative body was of short duration. My vocation
abroad left me little time to study the many matters of local legislation;
hence my resignation, and the appointment of my son Lewis to fill out
my term.
I have thus far told my story without copious quotations from my
letters, speeches, or other writings, and shall not depart from this rule
in what remains to be told, except to insert here my speech, delivered
at Arlington, near the monument to the “Unknown Loyal Dead,” on
Decoration Day, 1871. It was delivered under impressive
circumstances, in presence of President Grant, his Cabinet, and a
great multitude of distinguished people, and expresses, as I think, the
true view which should be taken of the great conflict between slavery
and freedom to which it refers.
“Friends and Fellow Citizens: Tarry here for a moment. My

words shall be few and simple. The solemn rites of this hour and
place call for no lengthened speech. There is in the very air of this
resting ground of the unknown dead a silent, subtle, and an all-
pervading eloquence, far more touching, impressive, and thrilling
than living lips have ever uttered. Into the measureless depths of
every loyal soul it is now whispering lessons of all that is precious,
priceless, holiest, and most enduring in human existence.
“Dark and sad will be the hour to this nation when it forgets to
pay grateful homage to its greatest benefactors. The offering we
bring to-day is due alike to the patriot soldiers dead and their noble
comrades who still live; for whether living or dead, whether in time
or eternity, the loyal soldiers who imperiled all for country and
freedom are one and inseparable.
“Those unknown heroes whose whitened bones have been
piously gathered here, and whose green graves we now strew with
sweet and beautiful flowers, choice emblems alike of pure hearts
and brave spirits, reached in their glorious career that last highest
point of nobleness beyond which human power cannot go. They
died for their country.
“No loftier tribute can be paid to the most illustrious of all the
benefactors of mankind than we pay to these unrecognized
soldiers, when we write above their graves this shining epitaph.
“When the dark and vengeful spirit of slavery, always
ambitious, preferring to rule in hell than to serve in heaven, fired
the Southern heart and stirred all the malign elements of discord;
when our great Republic, the hope of freedom and self-
government throughout the world, had reached the point of
supreme peril; when the Union of these States was torn and rent
asunder at the center, and the armies of a gigantic rebellion came
forth with broad blades and bloody hands to destroy the very
foundation of American society, the unknown braves who flung
themselves into the yawning chasm, where cannon roared and
bullets whistled, fought and fell. They died for their country.
“We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget
the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal
admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who
struck to save it,—those who fought for slavery and those who
fought for liberty and justice.
“I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I
would not repel the repentant, but may my “right hand forget her
cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,” if I forget
the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and
bloody conflict.
“If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with
widows and orphans, which has made stumps of men of the very
flower of our youth; sent them on the journey of life armless,
legless, maimed and mutilated; which has piled up a debt heavier
than a mountain of gold—swept uncounted thousands of men into
bloody graves, and planted agony at a million hearthstones; I say
if this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred
what shall men remember?
“The essence and significance of our devotions here to-day
are not to be found in the fact that the men whose remains fill
these graves were brave in battle. If we met simply to show our
sense of bravery, we should find enough to kindle admiration on
both sides. In the raging storm of fire and blood, in the fierce
torrent of shot and shell, of sword and bayonet, whether on foot or
on horse, unflinching courage marked the rebel not less than the
loyal soldier.
“But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has
been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory
to the rebellion meant death to the republic. We must never forget
that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves
between the nation and the nation’s destroyers. If to-day we have
a country not boiling in an agony of blood like France; if now we
have a united country, no longer cursed by the hell-black system
of human bondage; if the American name is no longer a by-word
and a hissing to a mocking earth; if the star spangled banner floats
only over free American citizens in every quarter of the land, and
our country has before it a long and glorious career of justice,
liberty, and civilization, we are indebted to the unselfish devotion of
the noble army who rest in these honored graves all around us.”
In the month of April, 1872, I had the honor to attend and preside
over a National Convention of colored citizens, held in New Orleans. It
was a critical period in the history of the Republican party, as well as in
that of the country. Eminent men who had hitherto been looked upon
as the pillars of Republicanism had become dissatisfied with President
Grant’s administration, and determined to defeat his nomination for a
second term. The leaders in this unfortunate revolt were Messrs.
Trumbull, Schurz, Greeley, and Sumner. Mr. Schurz had already
succeeded in destroying the Republican party in the State of Missouri,
and it seemed to be his ambition to be the founder of a new party, and
to him more than to any other man belongs the credit of what was
once known as the Liberal Republican party which made Horace
Greeley its standard bearer in the campaign of that year.
At the time of the Convention in New Orleans the elements of this
new combination were just coming together. The division in the
Republican ranks seemed to be growing deeper and broader every
day. The colored people of the country were much affected by the
threatened disruption, and their leaders were much divided as to the
side upon which they should give their voice and their votes. The
names of Greeley and Sumner, on account of their long and earnest
advocacy of justice and liberty to the blacks, had powerful attractions
for the newly enfranchised class; and there was in this Convention at
New Orleans naturally enough a strong disposition to fraternize with
the new party and follow the lead of their old friends. Against this policy
I exerted whatever influence I possessed, and, I think, succeeded in
holding back that Convention from what I felt sure then would have
been a fatal political blunder, and time has proved the correctness of
that position. My speech on taking the chair on that occasion was
telegraphed from New Orleans in full to the New York Herald, and the
key-note of it was that there was no path out of the Republican party
that did not lead directly into the Democratic party—away from our
friends and directly to our enemies. Happily this Convention pretty
largely agreed with me, and its members have not since regretted that
agreement.
From this Convention onward, until the nomination and election of
Grant and Wilson, I was actively engaged on the stump, a part of the
time in Virginia with Hon. Henry Wilson, in North Carolina with John M.
Longston and John H. Smyth, and in the State of Maine with Senator
Hamlin, Gen. B. F. Butler, Gen. Woodford, and Hon. James G. Blaine.
Since 1872 I have been regularly what my old friend Parker
Pillsbury would call a “field hand” in every important political campaign,
and at each National Convention have sided with what has been called
the stalwart element of the Republican party. It was in the Grant
Presidential campaign that New York took an advanced step in the
renunciation of a timid policy. The Republicans of that State not having
the fear of popular prejudice before their eyes placed my name as an
Elector at large at the head of their Presidential ticket. Considering the
deep-rooted sentiment of the masses against negroes, the noise and
tumult likely to be raised, especially among our adopted citizens of
Irish descent, this was a bold and manly proceeding, and one for which
the Republicans of the State of New York deserve the gratitude of
every colored citizen of the Republic, for it was a blow at popular
prejudice in a quarter where it was capable of making the strongest
resistance. The result proved not only the justice and generosity of the
measure, but its wisdom. The Republicans carried the State by a
majority of fifty thousand over the heads of the Liberal Republican and
the Democratic parties combined.
Equally significant of the turn now taken in the political sentiment of
the country, was the action of the Republican Electoral College at its
meeting in Albany, when it committed to my custody the sealed up
electoral vote of the great State of New York, and commissioned me to
bring that vote to the National Capital. Only a few years before, any
colored man was forbidden by law to carry a United States mail bag
from one post-office to another. He was not allowed to touch the
sacred leather, though locked in “triple steel,” but now, not a mail bag,
but a document which was to decide the Presidential question with all
its momentous interests, was committed to the hands of one of this
despised class; and around him, in the execution of his high trust, was
thrown all the safeguards provided by the Constitution and the laws of
the land. Though I worked hard and long to secure the nomination and
the election of Gen. Grant in 1872, I neither received nor sought office
under him. He was my choice upon grounds altogether free from
selfish or personal considerations. I supported him because he had
done all, and would do all, he could to save not only the country from
ruin, but the emancipated class from oppression and ultimate
destruction; and because Mr. Greeley, with the Democratic party
behind him, would not have the power, even if he had the disposition,
to afford us the needed protection which our peculiar condition
required. I could easily have secured the appointment as Minister to
Hayti, but preferred to urge the claims of my friend, Ebenezer Bassett,
a gentleman and a scholar, and a man well fitted by his good sense
and amiable qualities to fill the position with credit to himself and his
country. It is with a certain degree of pride that I am able to say that my
opinion of the wisdom of sending Mr. Bassett to Hayti has been fully
justified by the creditable manner in which, for eight years, he
discharged the difficult duties of that position; for I have the assurance
of Hon. Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State of the United States, that Mr.
Bassett was a good Minister. In so many words, the ex-Secretary told
me, that he “wished that one-half of his ministers abroad performed
their duties as well as Mr. Bassett.” To those who knew Hon. Hamilton
Fish, this compliment will not be deemed slight, for few men are less
given to exaggeration and are more scrupulously exact in the
observance of law, and in the use of language, than is that gentleman.
While speaking in this strain of complacency in reference to Mr.
Bassett, I take pleasure also in bearing my testimony based upon
knowledge obtained at the State Department, that Mr. John Mercer
Langston, the present Minister to Hayti, has acquitted himself with
equal wisdom and ability to that of Mr. Bassett in the same position.
Having known both these gentlemen in their youth, when the one was
at Yale, and the other at Oberlin College, and witnessed their efforts to
qualify themselves for positions of usefulness, it has afforded me no
limited satisfaction to see them rise in the world. Such men increase
the faith of all in the possibilities of their race, and make it easier for
those who are to come after them.
The unveiling of Lincoln Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington,
April 14th, 1876, and the part taken by me in the ceremonies of that
grand occasion, takes rank among the most interesting incidents of my
life, since it brought me into mental communication with a greater
number of the influential and distinguished men of the country than any
I had before known. There were present the President of the United
States and his Cabinet, Judges of the Supreme Court, the Senate and
House of Representatives, and many thousands of citizens to listen to
my address upon the illustrious man in whose memory the colored
people of the United States had, as a mark of their gratitude, erected
that impressive monument. Occasions like this have done wonders in
the removal of popular prejudice, and in lifting into consideration the
colored race; and I reckon it one of the high privileges of my life, that I
was permitted to have a share in this and several other like
celebrations.
The progress of a nation is sometimes indicated by small things.
When Henry Wilson, an honored Senator and Vice-President of the
United States, died in the capitol of the nation, it was a significant and
telling indication of national advance, when three colored citizens, Mr.
Robert Purvis, Mr. James Wormley, and myself, were selected with the
Senate committee, to accompany his honored remains from
Washington to the grand old commonwealth he loved so well, and
whom in turn she had so greatly loved and honored. It was meet and
right that we should be represented in the long procession that met
those remains in every State between here and Massachusetts, for
Henry Wilson was among the foremost friends of the colored race in
this country, and this was the first time in its history when a colored
man was made a pall-bearer at the funeral, as I was in this instance, of
a Vice-President of the United States.
An appointment to any important and lucrative office under the
United States government, usually brings its recipient a large measure
of praise and congratulation on the one hand, and much abuse and
disparagement on the other; and he may think himself singularly
fortunate if the censure does not exceed the praise. I need not dwell
upon the causes of this extravagance, but I may say there is no office
of any value in the country which is not desired and sought by many
persons equally meritorious and equally deserving. But as only one
person can be appointed to any one office, only one can be pleased,
while many are offended; unhappily, resentment follows
disappointment, and this resentment often finds expression in
disparagement and abuse of the successful man. As in most else I
have said, I borrow this reflection from my own experience.
My appointment as United States Marshal of the District of
Columbia, was in keeping with the rest of my life, as a freeman. It was
an innovation upon long established usage, and opposed to the
general current of sentiment in the community. It came upon the
people of the District as a gross surprise, and almost a punishment;
and provoked something like a scream—I will not say a yell—of
popular displeasure. As soon as I was named by President Hayes for
the place, efforts were made by members of the bar to defeat my
confirmation before the Senate. All sorts of reasons against my
appointment, but the true one, were given, and that was withheld more
from a sense of shame, than from a sense of justice. The
apprehension doubtless was, that if appointed marshal, I would
surround myself with colored deputies, colored bailiffs, colored
messengers, and pack the jury box with colored jurors; in a word,
Africanize the courts. But the most dreadful thing threatened, was a
colored man at the Executive Mansion in white kid gloves, sparrow-
tailed coat, patent leather boots, and alabaster cravat, performing the
ceremony—a very empty one—of introducing the aristocratic citizens
of the republic to the President of the United States. This was
something entirely too much to be borne; and men asked themselves
in view of it, to what is the world coming? and where will these things
stop? Dreadful! Dreadful!
It is creditable to the manliness of the American Senate, that it was
moved by none of these things, and that it lost no time in the matter of
my confirmation. I learn, and believe my information correct, that
foremost among those who supported my confirmation against the
objections made to it, was Hon. Roscoe Conkling of New York. His
speech in executive session is said by the senators who heard it, to
have been one of the most masterly and eloquent ever delivered on
the floor of the Senate; and this too I readily believe, for Mr. Conkling
possesses the ardor and fire of Henry Clay, the subtlety of Calhoun,
and the massive grandeur of Daniel Webster.
The effort to prevent my confirmation having failed, nothing could
be done but to wait for some overt act to justify my removal; and for
this my unfriends had not long to wait. In the course of one or two
months I was invited by a number of citizens of Baltimore to deliver a
lecture in that city in Douglass Hall—a building named in honor of
myself, and devoted to educational purposes. With this invitation I
complied, giving the same lecture which I had two years before
delivered in the city of Washington, and which was at the time
published in full in the newspapers, and very highly commended by
them. The subject of the lecture was, “Our National Capital,” and in it I
said many complimentary things of the city, which were as true as they
were complimentary. I spoke of what it had been in the past, what it
was at that time, and what I thought it destined to become in the future;
giving it all credit for its good points, and calling attention to some of its
ridiculous features. For this I got myself pretty roughly handled. The
newspapers worked themselves up to a frenzy of passion, and
committees were appointed to procure names to a petition to President
Hayes demanding my removal. The tide of popular feeling was so
violent, that I deemed it necessary to depart from my usual custom
when assailed, so far as to write the following explanatory letter, from
which the reader will be able to measure the extent and quality of my
offense:
“To the Editor of the Washington Evening Star:
“Sir:—You were mistaken in representing me as being off on a
lecturing tour, and, by implication, neglecting my duties as United
States Marshal of the District of Columbia. My absence from
Washington during two days was due to an invitation by the
managers to be present on the occasion of the inauguration of the
International Exhibition in Philadelphia.
“In complying with this invitation, I found myself in company
with other members of the government who went thither in
obedience to the call of patriotism and civilization. No one interest
of the Marshal’s office suffered by my temporary absence, as I had
seen to it that those upon whom the duties of the office devolved
were honest, capable, industrious, painstaking, and faithful. My
Deputy Marshal is a man every way qualified for his position, and
the citizens of Washington may rest assured that no unfaithful man
will be retained in any position under me. Of course I can have
nothing to say as to my own fitness for the position I hold. You
have a right to say what you please on that point; yet I think it
would be only fair and generous to wait for some dereliction of
duty on my part before I shall be adjudged as incompetent to fill
the place.
“You will allow me to say also that the attacks upon me on
account of the remarks alleged to have been made by me in
Baltimore, strike me as both malicious and silly. Washington is a
great city, not a village nor a hamlet, but the capital of a great
nation, and the manners and habits of its various classes are
proper subjects for presentation and criticism, and I very much
mistake if this great city can be thrown into a tempest of passion
by any humorous reflections I may take the liberty to utter. The city
is too great to be small, and I think it will laugh at the ridiculous
attempt to rouse it to a point of furious hostility to me for any thing
said in my Baltimore lecture.
“Had the reporters of that lecture been as careful to note what
I said in praise of Washington as what I said, if you please, in
disparagement of it, it would have been impossible to awaken any
feeling against me in this community for what I said. It is the
easiest thing in the world, as all editors know, to pervert the
meaning and give a one-sided impression of a whole speech by
simply giving isolated passages from the speech itself, without any
qualifying connections. It would hardly be imagined from anything
that has appeared here that I had said one word in that lecture in
honor of Washington, and yet the lecture itself, as a whole, was
decidedly in the interest of the national capital. I am not such a fool
as to decry a city in which I have invested my money and made
my permanent residence.
“After speaking of the power of the sentiment of patriotism I
held this language: ‘In the spirit of this noble sentiment I would
have the American people view the national capital. It is our
national center. It belongs to us; and whether it is mean or
majestic, whether arrayed in glory or covered with shame, we
cannot but share its character and its destiny. In the remotest
section of the republic, in the most distant parts of the globe, amid
the splendors of Europe or the wilds of Africa, we are still held and
firmly bound to this common center. Under the shadow of Bunker
Hill monument, in the peerless eloquence of his diction, I once
heard the great Daniel Webster give welcome to all American
citizens, assuring them that wherever else they might be
strangers, they were all at home there. The same boundless
welcome is given to all American citizens by Washington.
Elsewhere we may belong to individual States, but here we belong
to the whole United States. Elsewhere we may belong to a
section, but here we belong to a whole country, and the whole
country belongs to us. It is national territory, and the one place
where no American is an intruder or a carpet-bagger. The new
comer is not less at home than the old resident. Under its lofty
domes and stately pillars, as under the broad blue sky, all races
and colors of men stand upon a footing of common equality.
“‘The wealth and magnificence which elsewhere might oppress
the humble citizen has an opposite effect here. They are felt to be
a part of himself and serve to ennoble him in his own eyes. He is
an owner of the marble grandeur which he beholds about him,—as
much so as any of the forty millions of this great nation. Once in
his life every American who can should visit Washington: not as
the Mahometan to Mecca; not as the Catholic to Rome; not as the
Hebrew to Jerusalem, nor as the Chinaman to the Flowery
kingdom, but in the spirit of enlightened patriotism, knowing the
value of free institutions and how to perpetuate and maintain them.
“‘Washington should be contemplated not merely as an
assemblage of fine buildings; not merely as the chosen resort of
the wealth and fashion of the country; not merely as the honored
place where the statesmen of the nation assemble to shape the
policy and frame the laws; not merely as the point at which we are
most visibly touched by the outside world, and where the
diplomatic skill and talent of the old continent meet and match
themselves against those of the new, but as the national flag itself
—a glorious symbol of civil and religious liberty, leading the world
in the race of social science, civilization, and renown.’
“My lecture in Baltimore required more than an hour and a half
for its delivery, and every intelligent reader will see the difficulty of
doing justice to such a speech when it is abbreviated and
compressed into a half or three-quarters of a column. Such
abbreviation and condensation has been resorted to in this
instance. A few stray sentences, called out from their connections,
would be deprived of much of their harshness if presented in the
form and connection in which they were uttered; but I am taking up
too much space, and will close with the last paragraph of the
lecture, as delivered in Baltimore. ‘No city in the broad world has a
higher or more beneficent mission. Among all the great capitals of
the world it is preëminently the capital of free institutions. Its fall
would be a blow to freedom and progress throughout the world.
Let it stand then where it does now stand—where the father of his
country planted it, and where it has stood for more than half a
century; no longer sandwiched between two slave States; no
longer a contradiction to human progress; no longer the hot-bed of
slavery and the slave trade; no longer the home of the duelist, the
gambler, and the assassin; no longer the frantic partisan of one
section of the country against the other; no longer anchored to a
dark and semi-barbarous past, but a redeemed city, beautiful to
the eye and attractive to the heart, a bond of perpetual union, an
angel of peace on earth and good will to men, a common ground
upon which Americans of all races and colors, all sections, North
and South, may meet and shake hands, not over a chasm of
blood, but over a free, united, and progressive republic.’”
I have already alluded to the fact that much of the opposition to my

appointment to the office of United States Marshal of the District of
Columbia was due to the possibility of my being called to attend
President Hayes at the Executive Mansion upon state occasions, and
having the honor to introduce the guests on such occasions. I now
wish to refer to reproaches liberally showered upon me for holding the
office of Marshal while denied this distinguished honor, and to show
that the complaint against me at this point is not a well founded
complaint.
1st. Because the office of United States Marshal is distinct and
separate and complete in itself, and must be accepted or refused upon
its own merits. If, when offered to any person, its duties are such as he
can properly fulfill, he may very properly accept it; or, if otherwise, he
may as properly refuse it.
2d. Because the duties of the office are clearly and strictly defined
in the law by which it was created; and because nowhere among these
duties is there any mention or intimation that the Marshal may or shall
attend upon the President of the United States at the Executive
Mansion on state occasions.
3d. Because the choice as to who shall have the honor and
privilege of such attendance upon the President belongs exclusively
and reasonably to the President himself, and that therefore no one,
however distinguished, or in whatever office, has any just cause to
complain of the exercise by the President of this right of choice, or
because he is not himself chosen.
In view of these propositions, which I hold to be indisputable, I
should have presented to the country a most foolish and ridiculous
figure had I, as absurdly counseled by some of my colored friends,
resigned the office of Marshal of the District of Columbia, because
President Rutherford B. Hayes, for reasons that must have been
satisfactory to his judgment, preferred some person other than myself
to attend upon him at the Executive Mansion and perform the
ceremony of introduction on state occasions. But it was said, that this
statement did not cover the whole ground; that it was customary for the
United States Marshal of the District of Columbia to perform this social
office; and that the usage had come to have almost the force of law. I
met this at the time, and I meet it now by denying the binding force of
this custom. No former President has any right or power to make his
example the rule for his successor. The custom of inviting the Marshal
to do this duty was made by a President, and could be as properly
unmade by a President. Besides, the usage is altogether a modern
one, and had its origin in peculiar circumstances, and was justified by
those circumstances. It was introduced in time of war by President
Lincoln when he made his old law partner and intimate acquaintance
Marshal of the District, and was continued by Gen. Grant when he
appointed a relative of his, Gen. Sharp, to the same office. But again it
was said that President Hayes only departed from this custom
because the Marshal in my case was a colored man. The answer I
made to this, and now make to it, is, that it is a gratuitous assumption
and entirely begs the question. It may or may not be true that my
complexion was the cause of this departure, but no man has any right
to assume that position in advance of a plain declaration to that effect
by President Hayes himself. Never have I heard from him any such
declaration or intimation. In so far as my intercourse with him is
concerned, I can say that I at no time discovered in him a feeling of
aversion to me on account of my complexion, or on any other account,
and, unless I am greatly deceived, I was ever a welcome visitor at the
Executive Mansion on state occasions and all others, while Rutherford
B. Hayes was President of the United States. I have further to say that
I have many times during his administration had the honor to introduce
distinguished strangers to him, both of native and foreign birth, and
never had reason to feel myself slighted by himself or his amiable wife;
and I think he would be a very unreasonable man who could desire for
himself, or for any other, a larger measure of respect and consideration
than this at the hands of a man and woman occupying the exalted
positions of Mr. and Mrs. Hayes.
I should not do entire justice to the Honorable ex-President if I did
not bear additional testimony to his noble and generous spirit. When all
Washington was in an uproar, and a wild clamor rent the air for my
removal from the office of Marshal on account of the lecture delivered
by me in Baltimore, when petitions were flowing in upon him
demanding my degradation, he nobly rebuked the mad spirit of
persecution by openly declaring his purpose to retain me in my place.
One other word. During the tumult raised against me in
consequence of this lecture on the “National Capital,” Mr. Columbus
Alexander, one of the old and wealthy citizens of Washington, who was
on my bond for twenty thousand dollars, was repeatedly besought to
withdraw his name, and thus leave me disqualified; but like the
President, both he and my other bondsman, Mr. George Hill, Jr., were
steadfast and immovable. I was not surprised that Mr. Hill stood
bravely by me, for he was a Republican; but I was surprised and
gratified that Mr. Alexander, a Democrat, and, I believe, once a
slaveholder, had not only the courage, but the magnanimity to give me
fair play in this fight. What I have said of these gentlemen, can be
extended to very few others in this community, during that period of
excitement, among either the white or colored citizens, for, with the
exception of Dr. Charles B. Purvis, no colored man in the city uttered
one public word in defence or extenuation of me or of my Baltimore
speech.
This violent hostility kindled against me was singularly evanescent.
It came like a whirlwind, and like a whirlwind departed. I soon saw
nothing of it, either in the courts among the lawyers, or on the streets
among the people; for it was discovered that there was really in my
speech at Baltimore nothing which made me “worthy of stripes or of
bonds.”
Marshal at the Inauguration of Pres.
Garfield.
I can say from my experience in the office of United States Marshal
of the District of Columbia, it was every way agreeable. When it was
an open question whether I should take the office or not, it was
apprehended and predicted if I should accept it in face of the
opposition of the lawyers and judges of the courts, I should be
subjected to numberless suits for damages, and so vexed and worried
that the office would be rendered valueless to me; that it would not
only eat up my salary, but possibly endanger what little I might have
laid up for a rainy day. I have now to report that this apprehension was
in no sense realized. What might have happened had the members of
the District bar been half as malicious and spiteful as they had been
industriously represented as being, or if I had not secured as my
assistant a man so capable, industrious, vigilant, and careful as Mr.
L. P. Williams, of course I cannot know. But I am bound to praise the
bridge that carries me safely over it. I think it will ever stand as a
witness to my fitness for the position of Marshal, that I had the wisdom
to select for my assistant a gentleman so well instructed and
competent. I also take pleasure in bearing testimony to the generosity
of Mr. Phillips, the assistant Marshal who preceded Mr. Williams in that
office, in giving the new assistant valuable information as to the
various duties he would be called upon to perform. I have further to
say of my experience in the Marshal’s office, that while I have reason
to know that the eminent Chief Justice of the District of Columbia and
some of his associates were not well pleased with my appointment, I
was always treated by them, as well as by the chief clerk of the courts,
Hon. J. R. Meigs, and the subordinates of the latter (with a single
exception), with the respect and consideration due to my office. Among
the eminent lawyers of the District I believe I had many friends, and
there were those of them to whom I could always go with confidence in
an emergency for sound advice and direction, and this fact, after all the
hostility felt in consequence of my appointment, and revived by my
speech at Baltimore, is another proof of the vincibility of all feeling
arising out of popular prejudices.
In all my forty years of thought and labor to promote the freedom
and welfare of my race, I never found myself more widely and painfully
at variance with leading colored men of the country, than when I
opposed the effort to set in motion a wholesale exodus of colored
people of the South to the Northern States; and yet I never took a
position in which I felt myself better fortified by reason and necessity. It
was said of me, that I had deserted to the old master class, and that I
was a traitor to my race; that I had run away from slavery myself, and
yet I was opposing others in doing the same. When my opponents
condescended to argue, they took the ground that the colored people
of the South needed to be brought into contact with the freedom and
civilization of the North; that no emancipated and persecuted people
ever had or ever could rise in the presence of the people by whom
they had been enslaved, and that the true remedy for the ills which the
freedmen were suffering, was to initiate the Israelitish departure from
our modern Egypt to a land abounding, if not in “milk and honey,”
certainly in pork and hominy.
Influenced, no doubt, by the dazzling prospects held out to them
by the advocates of the exodus movement, thousands of poor, hungry,
naked, and destitute colored people were induced to quit the South
amid the frosts and snows of a dreadful winter in search of a better
country. I regret to say there was something sinister in this so-called
exodus, for it transpired that some of the agents most active in
promoting it had an understanding with certain railroad companies, by
which they were to receive one dollar per head upon all such
passengers. Thousands of these poor people, traveling only so far as
they had money to bear their expenses, were dropped on the levees of
St. Louis, in the extremest destitution; and their tales of woe were such
as to move a heart much less sensitive to human suffering than mine.
But while I felt for these poor deluded people, and did what I could to
put a stop to their ill-advised and ill-arranged stampede, I also did what
I could to assist such of them as were within my reach, who were on
their way to this land of promise. Hundreds of these people came to
Washington, and at one time there were from two to three hundred
lodged here, unable to get further for the want of money. I lost no time
in appealing to my friends for the means of assisting them.
Conspicuous among these friends was Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson of
New York city—the lady who, several years ago, made the nation a
present of Carpenter’s great historical picture of the “Signing of the
Emancipation Proclamation,” and who has expended large sums of her
money in investigating the causes of yellow-fever, and in endeavors to
discover means for preventing its ravages in New Orleans and
elsewhere. I found Mrs. Thompson consistently alive to the claims of
humanity in this, as in other instances, for she sent me, without delay,
a draft for two hundred and fifty dollars, and in doing so expressed the
wish that I would promptly inform her of any other opportunity of doing
good. How little justice was done me by those who accused me of
indifference to the welfare of the colored people of the South on
account of my opposition to the so-called exodus will be seen by the
following extracts from a paper on that subject laid before the Social
Science Congress at Saratoga, when that question was before the
country:
* * * * *
“Important as manual labor is everywhere, it is nowhere more

important and absolutely indispensable to the existence of society
than in the more southern of the United States. Machinery may
continue to do, as it has done, much of the work of the North, but
the work of the South requires bone, sinew, and muscle of the
strongest and most enduring kind for its performance. Labor in that
section must know no pause. Her soil is pregnant and prolific with
life and energy. All the forces of nature within her borders are
wonderfully vigorous, persistent, and active. Aided by an almost
perpetual summer abundantly supplied with heat and moisture,
her soil readily and rapidly covers itself with noxious weeds, dense
forests, and impenetrable jungles. Only a few years of non-tillage
would be needed to give the sunny and fruitful South to the bats
and owls of a desolate wilderness. From this condition, shocking
for a southern man to contemplate, it is now seen that nothing less
powerful than the naked iron arm of the negro, can save her. For
him as a Southern laborer, there is no competitor or substitute.
The thought of filling his place by any other variety of the human
family, will be found delusive and utterly impracticable. Neither
Chinaman, German, Norwegian, nor Swede can drive him from
the sugar and cotton fields of Louisiana and Mississippi. They
would certainly perish in the black bottoms of these states if they
could be induced, which they cannot, to try the experiment.
“Nature itself, in those States, comes to the rescue of the
negro, fights his battles, and enables him to exact conditions from
those who would unfairly treat and oppress him. Besides being
dependent upon the roughest and flintiest kind of labor, the climate
of the South makes such labor uninviting and harshly repulsive to
the white man. He dreads it, shrinks from it, and refuses it. He
shuns the burning sun of the fields and seeks the shade of the
verandas. On the contrary, the negro walks, labors, and sleeps in
the sunlight unharmed. The standing apology for slavery was
based upon a knowledge of this fact. It was said that the world
must have cotton and sugar, and that only the negro could supply
this want; and that he could be induced to do it only under the
“beneficent whip” of some bloodthirsty Legree. The last part of this
argument has been happily disproved by the large crops of these
productions since Emancipation; but the first part of it stands firm,
unassailed and unassailable.
“Even if climate and other natural causes did not protect the
negro from all competition in the labor-market of the South,
inevitable social causes would probably effect the same result.
The slave system of that section has left behind it, as in the nature
of the case it must, manners, customs, and conditions to which
free white laboring men will be in no haste to submit themselves
and their families. They do not emigrate from the free North, where
labor is respected, to a lately enslaved South, where labor has
been whipped, chained, and degraded for centuries. Naturally
enough such emigration follows the lines of latitude in which they
who compose it were born. Not from South to North, but from East
to West ‘the Star of Empire takes its way.’
“Hence it is seen that the dependence of the planters, land-
owners, and old master-class of the South upon the negro,
however galling and humiliating to Southern pride and power, is
nearly complete and perfect. There is only one mode of escape for
them, and that mode they will certainly not adopt. It is to take off
their own coats, cease to whittle sticks and talk politics at cross-
roads, and go themselves to work in their broad and sunny fields
of cotton and sugar. An invitation to do this is about as harsh and
distasteful to all their inclinations as would be an invitation to step
down into their graves. With the negro, all this is different. Neither
natural, artificial, or traditional causes stand in the way of the
freedman to labor in the South. Neither the heat nor the fever-
demon which lurks in her tangled and oozy swamps affright him,
and he stands to-day the admitted author of whatever prosperity,
beauty, and civilization are now possessed by the South, and the
admitted arbiter of her destiny.
“This then, is the high vantage ground of the negro; he has
labor; the South wants it, and must have it or perish. Since he is
free he can now give it or withhold it, use it where he is, or take it
elsewhere as he pleases. His labor made him a slave, and his
labor can, if he will, make him free, comfortable, and independent.
It is more to him than fire, swords, ballot-boxes, or bayonets. It
touches the heart of the South through its pocket. This power
served him well years ago, when in the bitterest extremity of
destitution. But for it, he would have perished when he dropped
out of slavery. It saved him then, and it will save him again.
Emancipation came to him, surrounded by extremely unfriendly
circumstances. It was not the choice or consent of the people
among whom he lived, but against their will, and a death struggle
on their part to prevent it. His chains were broken in the tempest
and whirlwind of civil war. Without food, without shelter, without
land, without money, and without friends, he with his children, his
sick, his aged and helpless ones, were turned loose and naked to
the open sky. The announcement of his freedom was instantly
followed by an order from his master to quit his old quarters, and
to seek bread thereafter from the hands of those who had given
him his freedom. A desperate extremity was thus forced upon him
at the outset of his freedom, and the world watched with humane
anxiety, to see what would become of him. His peril was imminent.
Starvation and death stared him in the face and marked him for
their victim.
“It will not soon be forgotten that at the close of a five hours’
speech by the late Senator Sumner, in which he advocated with
unequaled learning and eloquence the enfranchisement of the
freedmen, the best argument with which he was met in the
Senate, was that legislation at that point would be utterly
superfluous; that the negro was rapidly dying out, and must
inevitably and speedily disappear and become extinct.
“Inhuman and shocking as was this consignment of millions of
human beings to extinction, the extremity of the negro, at that
date, did not contradict, but favored, the prophecy. The policy of
the old master-class dictated by passion, pride, and revenge, was
then to make the freedom of the negro, a greater calamity to him,

Tools and The Organism Technology and The Body in Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine 1St Edition Colin Webster Online Ebook Texxtbook Full Chapter PDF

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Tools and the Organism: Technology

and the Body in Ancient Greek and

The Art of the Catapult Build Greek Ballistae Roman

Sex Symbolists and the Greek Body Bloomsbury Studies in

Localism and the Ancient Greek City State 1st Edition

The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales Legends and Myths

Greek and Roman Painting and the Digital Humanities 1st

Senses, Cognition, and Ritual Experience in the Roman

The Universi ty of C hi cag o P r es s

ISB N-­13: 978-­0-­226-­82877-­0 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Webster, Colin (Classicist), author.

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992

1 : H ipp o c r ate s a n d T ec hno lo g ic a l I nt e r fac e s

4 : Th e Ris e o f the O rg a ni s m i n t he He l l e n i sti c P e r i od

5 : Th e O rga ni s m a nd Its Alt e r nat i ve s

6: Galen and the Technologies of the Vitalist Organism

Sens. ▶ De sensu et sensibilibus/On Sense and Sensible Things

Aff. Dig. ▶ De propriorum animi cuiusque affectum dignotione et curatione;

Ptis. ▶ De ptisana/Barley Gruel

All translations are my own, except where otherwise indicated.

0.1 Technologies and t he

No narrative of the future would be complete without bodies augmented

1. Haraway 1991: 150.

3. See Byl 1971; Ioannidi 1981.

around solid components rather than liquids or humors. Tools of dissec-

5. Hacking 1983: 230.

real. Nevertheless, the specific contours of any somatic behavior change

emphasize how consequential ancient technological environments were

deemed to be a single phenomenon. Determining what counts as a rele-

0.2 Teleology, Mechanism, V i talism,

12. Latour 2004.

wherein some divine figure arranges the world to certain purposes. In

an individuated task. Understanding the physiology of such an object re-

15. Wolfe 2021.

to assess ancient medical theories, asking whether certain Hippocratic

16. Lonie 1981a; 1981b.

to define technology have been astonishingly varied.20 While continental

relationship between these two concepts in certain Hippocratic treatises,

0.3 A nalogies, Metaphors, and M odels

23. Von Staden 2007.

ancient medical assumptions. Comparison is one of the main ways that

27. Kövecses (2010) provides an overview of metaphor that incorporates much

discovery or in the application of generalized laws into individual instan-

30. For contemporary interest in how analogies can function as heuristic

since doing so prevents us conflating the purpose of all comparisons in

where heuristic comparisons fail, or whether a high level of similarity exists.

the brain’s “hardware” and “software” without asking whether it requires

37. Derrida 1974.

We need not accept a poststructuralist account of language or accept

0.4 Chapter Overview

Ancient theories were built in worlds composed of objects, implements,

Hippocratic authors privilege different therapeutic technologies as their

were now a crucial part of the sprawling infrastructure of empire. Not

3. Hom. Il. 1.473–­474, 5.396–­403, 5.899–­904; Od. 19.455–­459.

that, to distinguish and group different “schools” of thought in the texts

reveal the intimate connection between developing medical technologies

1.1 Corp oreal Comp osition wi thout Organs

One striking feature of Hippocratic notions of corporeality is that their

ISB N-13: 978-0-226-82877-0 (cloth)

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

3. Hom. Il. 1.473–474, 5.396–403, 5.899–904; Od. 19.455–459.