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Abstract
This thesis explores the contributions of three treatises in the Hippocratic Corpus, namely On Art, On Ancient Medicine, and Nature of Man, to the debates surrounding the nature and existence of the medical art in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE. While On Art responds to attacks on the existence of medicine as a whole through an encomium of its empirical method of inference based on observation by which it is able to effect cures and alleviate the sufferings of the sick, On Ancient Medicine and On the Nature of Man reveal the philosophical disputes which in fact characterized early medicine, as both set forth competing visions of medical practice and methodology based on differing theories of the nature of the human body and the origins of disease. Each treatise offers valuable insights into the influence of philosophical speculation on medical thought of the day.