Symposium

of human beings toward the beautiful ones, but also toward many other things and in the other things, in the bodies of all animals and in what grows in the earth and, so to speak, in all the things that are, this I think I have caught sight of from medicine, our 186b craft, and of how great and marvellous the god is, and how he extends to everything, both in human and in divine affairs. And I shall begin by speaking from medicine, so that we may also give the craft its precedence. For the nature of bodies has this double Love: the healthy and the sick in the body are, as is agreed, different and unlike, and the unlike desires and is in love with unlike things. So the love in the wholesome is one thing, and the love in the unwholesome another. Now just as Pausanias was saying a moment ago that it is beautiful to gratify the good among human beings, 186c and shameful to gratify the licentious, so also in bodies themselves it is beautiful, and necessary, to gratify what is good and wholesome in each body, and this is what has the name ‘the medical’; and it is shameful to gratify what is bad and unwholesome, and one must refuse it gratification, if one is to be a master of the craft. For medicine is, to put it in a word, knowledge of the body’s matters of love with regard to surfeit and emptying; and the one who distinguishes in these the 186d beautiful and the shameful love, he is the most skilled in medicine; and the one who brings about a change, so that the one love is acquired in place of the other, and who knows how to implant love in those in whom it is not present but ought to be, and to remove it when it is present, would be a good craftsman. For indeed he must be able to make the things in the body that are most hostile friends, and in love with one another. And the most hostile are the most opposite: cold to hot, bitter to sweet, dry to wet, 186e all such things; knowing how to implant love and concord in these, our ancestor Asclepius, as these