Le motif du médecin tyran de Platon à Galien

Abstract

At various points in Method of medicine and in a passage in the Commentary on the Hippocratic Epidemics Galen takes up the image of the tyrant doctor employed by Plato in the famous passage in the Laws in which, to illustrate the role of the proem to the law, he introduces the contrast between doctors of freemen and doctors of slaves (Leg. IV 719e 8-720e 5): this is an unexplored chapter of Galen’s Platonism. Galen’s rereading, however, takes up the Platonic image no longer with reference to the doctor-patient relationship, but to the controversies between the different medical schools operating in the 2nd century AD. It also makes it possible to assert – in line with a well- established, but non univocal, critical tradition – the fully rational nature of the persuasion exercised by the proems, alluded to in the text of the Laws.