La médecine comme ars conjectandi

Abstract

In Antiquity, medical practice was conceptualized in the form of stochastic art. The conjectural approach (Stochastikê Technê) was at that time subjective: the physician aimed to cure his patient thanks to the gestures and remedies that were known to circumvent the hazards of the pathology. With the stochastic focus, the endpoint however remains uncertain. Failure is an ever-present threat. And, for that matter, some ethics that can get it right must be developed. Long before Bernoulli’s law of large numbers and Bayes’s theorem could mathematically model conjectures, it seems that the letter had developed intuitively in medical acts. Is the conjectural reasoning of ancient physicians reducible to calculation? Although its semeiotic form may make us think so, this hypothesis is problematized by the history of medicine. Is there any historical continuity or discontinuity in the medical act of conjecture?

Keywords

• conjecture
• numerical method
• intuition
• hazard
• calculation