ABSTRACT
Many societies have models of disease that are based on a physical understanding of how the human body works. Some of these are more familiar to modern readers than others. For example the humoral theory, which underpinned learned Western medicine from antiquity into the seventeenth century and beyond, looks very different from modern biomedicine but it is nonetheless based on an understanding of how certain physical factors within the body affect health: in this case, the four humours of blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. 1 However, physical models are rarely the only explanations for disease available or the basis for every kind of treatment. Instead they coexist with other models which can be described as religious and/or magical. An awareness of the difference between physical and non-physical models of disease goes back to the ancient world. For example, in around 400 bc the ancient Greek medical treatise On the Sacred Disease, which is part of the Hippocratic corpus, rejected religious explanations for epilepsy in favour of physical ones:
I do not believe that the ‘Sacred Disease’ is any more divine or sacred than any other disease but, on the contrary, has specific characteristics and a definite cause. Nevertheless, because it is completely different from other diseases, it has been regarded as a divine visitation by those who, being only human, view it with ignorance and astonishment. 2
