medicine

Treatment by Opposites (Contraria Contrariis)

τὰ ἐναντία τῶν ἐναντίων ἰάματα

Cool the fever, warm the chill, drain the overfull: cure is the imbalance turned against itself, the body coaxed back to its mean.

Ancient Greek medicine held that health is a balance of the body's qualities — hot and cold, wet and dry — and that disease is that balance gone astray. The healer's task, then, was to push back in the opposite direction: warming what had grown cold, drying what had grown moist, emptying what was overfilled. First crystallized in the Hippocratic writings and given a full theoretical scaffolding by Galen, this principle of "opposites cure opposites" governed the choice of drugs, diet, and regimen in the West for nearly two thousand years.

Where this idea shows up

5 Greek sources

Where to read it

Symposium385 BCE
Plato· Athens
De diaeta in morbis acutis370 BCE
Hippocrates· Kos
On Architecture15 BCE
Vitruvius· Rome
De Medicina50 CE
Celsus· Rome
De primo frigido120 CE
Plutarch· Chaeronea