Why Should Medicine Be Considered A Techne

During this time, it was disputed whether medicine should be considered a techne. The criticism surrounding medicine was that their practice did not always lead to a desired outcome, which was the very goal of a techne. This criticism is due to the fact that often times, despite the physician’s therapeutic attempts to intervene, the patient would still die. As a result, medicine is unlike other techne, where if an architect’s building failed it would be attributed to the architect’s failure. However, in a physician’s case, they claimed that it would not necessarily be that of their own failure. Rather, the disease may have progressed too far before the physician intervened or the patient did not follow the regime precisely as prescribed.
These guidelines are known today as the Hippocratic Oath. The oath further explains, when entering a patient home, a physician will help the sick and do no harm or will not use his position to engage in any sexual acts. This oath sets many ethical guidelines for the physician to follow such as, “I will not cut, even for the stone, but I will leave such procedures to the practitioners of that craft.” Interestingly, it is clear in other Hippocratic Corpus writings, not all physicians followed this oath or knew of
Remember, that a physician should not treat terminally ill patients in order to maintain a good reputation. Therefore, in order to preserve his reputation a physician would be wary to treat patients who displayed signs of the Hippocratic Face, as he would know that death is imminent. After selecting a patient and gaining a background on disease he would begin a treatment plan for the patient. He would do this with the tools available to him some of these include barley (broth, gruel, and barley cakes), wine, hydromel, honey, enemas, and fomentations to name a few. For example, let us say the physician took a case, of a boy who was 10 years of age and appeared pale and thin. The mother explains her son has a lower abdominal pain, has been constipated for more than 3 days, is cool to the touch and refuses to eat. A keen doctor would remember a cold stomach does not digest food so he child should be slowly warmed. He might also apply a warm fomentation on the lower stomach in order to relieve the pain and further warm the stomach. Most importantly, he would perform an enema in order to alleviate the blockage in the bowel. If he noticed the stool was dry he would remember to balance the humors and would give the patient wet foods. At first, the physician would begin with barley broth, then gruel, and eventually barley cakes so the child could slowly adjust to the foods. He would