Dogmatic school

The Dogmatic school of medicine (Dogmatics, or Dogmatici, Greek: Δογματικοί) was a school of medicine in ancient Greece and Rome. They were the oldest of the medical sects of antiquity. They derived their name from dogma, a philosophical tenet or opinion, because they professed to follow the opinions of Hippocrates, hence they were sometimes called Hippocratici. Thessalus, the son, and Polybus, the son-in-law of Hippocrates, were the founders of this sect, c. 400 BC, which enjoyed great reputation, and held undisputed sway over the whole medical profession, until the establishment of the Alexandrian school known as the Empiric school. After the rise of Empiric school, for some centuries, every physician counted himself under either one or the other of the two parties. The most distinguished among this school were Diocles of Carystus, Praxagoras of Cos, and Plistonicus. The doctrines of this school are described by Aulus Cornelius Celsus in the introduction to his De Medicina.

The Dogmatic school held that it was necessary to be acquainted with the hidden causes of diseases, as well as the more evident causes, and to know how the natural actions and different functions of the human body take place, which necessarily assumes a knowledge of the interior parts.

They gave the name of hidden causes to those things which concern the elements or principles of which our bodies are composed, and the occasion of good or ill health. It is impossible, they said, for people to know how to set about curing an illness unless they know what it comes from; since there is no doubt that they must treat it in one way, if diseases in general proceed from the excess or deficiency of one of the four elements, as some philosophers supposed; in another way, if all the malady lies in the humours of the body, as Herophilus thought; in another, if it is to be attributed to the respiration, according to the idea of Hippocrates (perhaps alluding to the De Flatibus, which is generally considered spurious); in another, if the blood excites inflammation by passing from the veins which are meant to contain it into the vessels that ought only to contain air, and if this inflammation produces the extraordinary movement of the blood that is remarked in fever, according to the opinion of Erasistratus; and in another, if it is by means of corpuscles which stop in the invisible passages and block up the way, as Asclepiades affirms to be the case. If this be granted, it must necessarily appear that, of all physicians, he will succeed the best in the cure of diseased who understands best their first origin and cause.

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