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Health

The rage for medical alchemy, which only grew during the Renaissance, brought into focus the importance of philosophical thinking, drawing upon the ideas of many cultures, to the development of notions about bodily health. Rationality, a peculiar obsession of the Greeks, contributed to the separation of bodily concerns from those of the spirit. Although ancient Greek physicians called themselves philosophers, they excluded from philosophical/medical consideration supernatural causes of disease as being the province of magicians, because they were anxious to define their young profession as different, and better, than that of the faith healer. Medieval Christian and Islamic physicians admitted that lack of health could be associated with sin or magic, but dismissed these factors as outside the realm of Aristotelian medical practice. The seventeenth-century thinker Descartes (1596-1650), as part of a larger mechanical philosophy, made a separation between mind and body that was total. For Descartes, and other mechanists who followed after him, the healthy body was nothing more than a well-functioning machine, soulless and subject to chemical and mechanical remedies.