The Doctor

This chapter examines the doctor model of leadership. In ancient Greek medicine, doctors saw their role as finding a balance between the different bodily ‘humours’. Analogously, leadership on this model involves balancing either the different objectives of an organization, or the groups and factions within it. This often involves restraining stakeholders prone to give excessive weight to seemingly attractive, but short-term objectives. The first part analyses passages in Plato’s Gorgias and Republic that develop this medical analogy. The second part illustrates the model with two modern-day examples: Roy Vagelos, CEO of Merck in the 1980s, who persuaded the company not to focus excessively on shareholder return, but to balance it against wider stakeholder concerns; and Jean Monnet, one of the founders of the EEC, who helped rebalance European nations away from the pursuit of nationalist goals, and hence put them on a long-term sustainable path to peace.

Ancient Greek medicine during Hellenistic age and the Roman Empire

In the Hellenistic Age and during the Roman Empire the greatest influence on the development medicine was exerted by two philosophers: Plato and Aristotle. Their views demonstrated by individual approaches of physicians and medical trends of empiricists, scepticists, dogmatists, methodologists and others. Beginning from the 1st century BC the overwhelming activity of Greek medicine practitioners was transferred to Rome where the most outstanding physicians such as Archagatos, Asclepiades, Temison, Soranos, Athenois, Archigenes and others appeared. In 46 BC all free foreigners practising in Rome were granted citizenship. In the first centuries of the Roman Empire medical practitioner were exempted from tax obligation and released from the performance of public service duties.

BLOOD FLOW IN ARISTOTLE

Modern readers view ancient theories of blood flow through the lens of circulation. Since the nineteenth century, scholarly work on the ancient understanding of the vascular system has run the gamut from attempting to prove that an ancient author had in fact, to some extent or another, pre-empted Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood or towards attempting, often with some empathetic embarrassment, to explain the failure on the part of an ancient author to notice something that seems so obvious to the modern eye. Thus C.R.S. Harris's 1973 book The Heart and Vascular System in Ancient Greek Medicine, which remains the standard on the topic, opens with a sentence in which he marvels at how the otherwise admirable ancient Greek physicians could have ‘failed entirely to arrive at any conception of the circulation of the blood’. This modern vantage point has had an unfortunate effect. In the case of Aristotle in particular, understanding of his cardiovascular system has been diminished by a tendency to define it in contradistinction to our own modern understanding of circulation. By deliberately uncoupling from the framework of modern physiology, this paper will offer a richer and more accurate picture of his views.

Therapy of the word and other psychotherapeutic approaches in Ancient Greek medicine

One of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary psychiatry is its firm grounding in a neurological and biochemical framework for the interpretation of mental life and its disturbances. In the absence of any strong neurological understanding or systematic knowledge of active pharmaceutical substances, one might expect that early ancient medicine readily resorted to non-somatic approaches to healing mental suffering. Instead, what is usually labelled “therapy of the word” and other forms of what one may call psychotherapy emerge relatively late in Greek medicine, only in the first centuries of our era. This paper provides an overview and analysis of this development in ancient history of psychology, philosophy and medicine, covering a broad period of time from the fifth century BCE to the end of the late-antique period, the fifth century CE. The focus is on the very idea (or lack thereof) of the curability of mental disturbance, and on the particular branch of therapeutics which addresses the psychological and existential condition of the patient, rather than his or her physiological state.