Publisher's Synopsis
Pythagoras's school recognised a special role to the teaching of medicine. This cultural heritage influenced all the thinkers who inquired into nature and man's place in it between the 6th and the 4th century B. C., especially in the Greek West. This volume aims at pointing out the traces of the close relationship between the Pythagorean thought and the practice of medicine through a direct and multidisciplinary approach to the sources. The research path focuses on four archetypal topics, Birth, Death, Purification and Oath, which represent the cultural anthropology key concepts of a wider dialogue between Pythagoreanism and medicine. This dialogue, which is quite vital and spontaneous between the pre-Hippocratic thinkers and the temple healers, doesn't seem to break off, even after the turning point of rational medicine: philosophers and physicians keep on influencing each other throughout the entire course of the history of medicine.
