Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper explores the notion of divine and its relationship with medicine in the Hippocratic treatise Decorum, which deals with ethical rules for physicians. After a general overview about the interrelation between medicine and religion in the Hippocratic Collection as well as in Galen, I provide a complete analysis of two central chapters of Decorum. On the one hand, the author assimilates the ideal physician to a god through the sentence « the physician who is a philosopher is godlike » (chapter 5). On the other hand, in chapter 6, he offers some interesting observations about the role that gods play in medicine. The notion of divine turns out to be extremely important in this medical treatise, where gods are presented as an ethical model for the ideal physician.