Abstract

The treatises De aeris locis (related to Cos) and De morbis I (attributed to Cnide) are often considered rivals by the Hippocratic criticism which still admits the existence of an ideological conflict between the authors. However, the comparative study of the different passages reveals a doctrinal identity which cannot be justified, as required by the traditional criticism, merely by the influence of one school on the other. So, besides an identical and etiological pattern (external and released causes and internal and humoural causes) the physiology of the two treatises is controlled by the same physical principles, those used by the Milesian physiologists to explain the water cycle and rain formation: the process of the disease is in fact related to cosmo-meteorological phenomena. It appears that their medical concepts, to which the physikoi contributed, have been elaborated from a micro-macrocosmic method: the microcosmic man is directed by the same laws as the macrocosmic universe. We are dealing in both treatises with a medicine based on a cosmological principle