Alcmaeon of Croton

Alcmaeon, an ancient Greek early-vintage natural philosopher having a wide spectrum of interests in phenomena, offering explanations of them in rational mechanistic terms as opposed to the prevailing explanations in terms of supernatural forces, interested in particular in medicine and physiology, lived sometime around 500 BCE, during and near the times of Pythagorus (ca. 570 – 490 BCE) and Hippocrates (460 – ca. 370 BCE). Scholars have credited Alcmaeon as the first person to recognize the brain as the organ of sense perception, of intelligence, and as the seat of the mind. Debernardi A, Sala E, D'Aliberti G, Talamonti G, Franchini AF, Collice M. (2010) Alcmaeon of Croton. Neurosurgery. 66(2):247-52. | Free Full-Text.
 *  Abstract: IN THE LATTER half of the sixth century BC, Croton was the site of the most famous medical school in Magna Graecia, where diseases of the human body were examined in a scientific and experimental manner instead of by using the contemporary supernatural, nearly magical concepts. Alcmaeon was one of the most active physicians interested in human physiology in the medical tradition of Croton. Although Alcmaeon was devoted to science and was a skillful experimentalist, little is known about his life and his exact birth date. The relative isolation of Alcmaeon from the great philosophical currents of his time probably facilitated his unprejudiced methodology and may have prevented him from disclosing his theories and demonstrating their value. He pioneered the concept of the relationship between the brain and the mind and was the first to identify the brain as the center of understanding and the essential organ for perceptions, sensations, and thoughts. Through systematic observations, Alcmaeon brought many things to light about the characteristics of the eye and the presence of channels connecting head sensory organs to the brain. He stated that the soul was immortal and introduced the tekmairesthai doctrine, through which the ideas of anamnesis and prognosis gave birth. We highlight his contributions to medical thought, and especially to neuroscience, which reveal Alcmaeon to be a thinker of considerable originality and one of the greatest philosophers, naturalists, and neuroscientists of all time.

• Anatomy, physiology, and medicine
Andreas Vesalius’s biographer, C. D. O’Malley, credits Alcmaeon as the earliest known “genuine student of anatomy”:

The earliest known genuine student of anatomy appears to have been Alcmaeon of Crotona, who lived in southern Italy, c. 500 B.C. Only the slightest fragments of his writing remain, but from these it does appear that he was the first to make dissections of animals, probably goats, and although almost nothing is known of the results, he did make the very important declaration that the brain is the central organ  of intelligence.

J. B. Wilbur and H. J. Allen give this introduction to Alcmaeon: Physiology and medicine were Alcmaeon's prime interest, which accounts for his concern with cognition and the nature of the soul. Because medicine had not yet emerged as a distinct discipline, however, Alcmaeon also expressed opinions on the immortality of the soul as well as on astronomy and cosmology--thus going beyond the limitations of his own medical empiricism. There are no fragments and little other information concerning his views on these last two subjects, but in any case it would seem that Alcmaeon's contributions are his ideas concerning knowledge and the soul. Wilbur JB, Allen HJ. (1979) The Worlds of the Early Greek Philosophers. Prometheus Books: Buffalo, NY.
 * About this book, from its Preface: The authors of this book have tried to do two things in presenting the written materials ascribed to the early Greek philosophers (c. 585 B.C.-400 B.C.) and the historical context in which those writings occurred. The first was to present a more fully fleshed out picture of the ideas of these men than has been given in the past. Perhaps under the influence of a narrow empiricism there has been a preference for letting the fragments speak for themselves. The trouble with this approach is that, even where there is a goodly number of fragments left, as, for instance, by Heraclitus, an adequate context for interpretation is not always evident from the fragments alone. And in the case of a thinker such as Anaximander, on the other hand, where there is so little firsthand evidence, what does remain is obscure taken solely on its own terms. Opposed to this Scylla of parsimony, there is, of course, the Charybdis of prodigal speculation. But we did not wish to hew a predetermined course equidistant from these two extremes. Rather the goal was to suit our passage to the winds and waters, sometimes nearer one than the other, as seemed best....The second aim, also in the nature of a mean between extremes, was to find a happy balance between overwhelming the reader with all the scholarly paraphernalia of etymology and philology, and presenting a stripped-down version of the ideas that conveys no sense of the condition and source of our knowledge about them. While, for all but the specialist, the former detracts from the ideas presented, the latter fails to give a proper appreciation of the subject. In practice, this means that we<tried to indicate, whenever possible, who attributed an idea to a given philosopher while at the same time providing the student with the relevant passage so he can read for himself what, for instance, Heraclitus said about Pythagoras. For this reason, the fragments themselves as well as essential interpretive passages are included in the text. Testimonials by other thinkers, which are of great importance to our knowledge of the earliest of these Greek philosophers, are either included in the body of the text or referred to at the bottom of the page, depending upon their relevance. A guide to these testimonial sources appears at the end of the book, along with a selected bibliography for the period as well as for the thinkers.

In the accompanying textbox, note Alcmaeon's speaking of equal distribution of ...forces and harmonius blending of qualities for preserving health. Forces and qualities evoke the thought of physiological activities, equal or equable (no extremes, not readily disturbed), of equable physiological activities &mdash; harmonious blending of homeostatically-adjusted equable physiological activities. Alcmaeon's thoughts might reflect an intuition or adumbration, perhaps, of modern integrative physiology. He viewed health as a lack of conflict among forces, and, always, as beneficial consequences of the performance of balanced physiological function. Alcmaeon seems to have had a holistic philosophy of health, before the Hippocratic Corpus and later holistic approaches to health.

According to Huffman, Alcmaeon "is likely to have written his book sometime between 500 and 450 BC." Since Hippocrates was born ~460 BCE, it seems possible that Hippocrates' rational approach to medicine was prompted or influenced by the views of Alcmaeon, a possibility entertained by many scholars of ancient Greek medicine.

In his general introduction to his translation of the works of Hippocrates and his disciples, W. H. S. Jones suggests that:

 The first philosophers to take a serious interest in medicine were the Pythagoreans. Alcmaeon of Croton, although perhaps not strictly a Pythagorean, was closely connected with the sect, and appears to have exercised considerable influence upon the Hippocratic school. The founder of empirical psychology and a student of astronomy, he held that health consists of a state of balance between certain " opposites," and disease an undue preponderance of one of them....The Treatise on Seven, with its marked Pythagorean characteristics, proves, if indeed it is as early as Roscher would have us believe, that even before Hippocrates disease was considered due to a disturbance in the balance of the humours, and health to a " coction " of them….

<ref name=Jones WHS. (1868) Hippocrates Collected Works, By Hippocrates, Edited by: W. H. S. Jones (trans.). Cambridge Harvard University Press. | Online.

• Alcmaeon's writings and their interpretation
Despite the scant fragments of his writings, Alcmaeon’s ideas did not die with him. According to Galen, Alcmaeon authored a book, On Nature, to which, before it disappeared, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and others had direct access for some time after Alcmaeon’s death.

Alcmaeon’s rich trove of ideas have earned him, according to various scholars, the honorific cognomens, Father of Physiology, Father of Anatomy, Father of Psychology, Founder of Gynecology, Creator of Psychiatry, and indeed, by some, Father of Medicine.


 * NB: The annotations of the citations in the Reference section following, and on the Bibliography subpage of this article, provide elaborations of the text and introduce additional information about Alcmaeon.