Which Patient, When, How Much
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Socrates — ἀξιῶ ἰατρικὸς εἶναι…
Phaedrus — δεῖ… ἕκαστα ποιεῖν.
The doctor analogy is Plato's sharpest tool, and Phaedrus wields it perfectly. Socrates imagines a man boasting to real physicians — Eryximachus and Acumenus, actual Athenian doctors — that he can make bodies hot or cold, make them vomit or purge, and so on, and that this knowledge makes him 'a doctor,' iatrikos, able to train others. Phaedrus's response is immediate and exactly right: they would ask whether he 'also knows,' prosepistatai, to which patients he should apply each of these, and when, and 'how much,' mechri hoposou. That question names the whole difference between a list of remedies and the art of medicine. Knowing that a drug heats or purges is knowing an ingredient; knowing which patient needs heating, at what moment in the illness, and in what dose, is knowing medicine. The first is information anyone could get from a book; the second is judgment, the capacity to fit the general remedy to the particular case — and it cannot be handed over as a list, because it is not a list but a trained discernment.
Socrates sets his first test case. Suppose a man went to the doctor Eryximachus, or his father Acumenus, and boasted: 'I know how to apply things to bodies to make them hot or cold, to induce vomiting or purging, and much else — and knowing this I claim to be a doctor, and to make a doctor of anyone I teach it to.' What, Socrates asks, would they say? Phaedrus knows exactly: they would ask whether he also knows which patients to treat, and when, and how much.
What Phaedrus's three questions — which, when, how much — pick out is the single thing that separates a genuine art from a stockpile of techniques, and it is worth naming precisely, because the whole positive theory of rhetoric will be built on it. Each question points to a knowledge of the particular. A pharmacology textbook can tell you what every drug does in general; it cannot tell you that this feverish patient, at this hour, needs this dose, because that depends on the specific case, which no general rule reaches by itself. The art of medicine is exactly the power to descend from the general knowledge to the particular application — to look at the individual before you and know what the general truth requires here, now, in this amount. The Greeks had a word hovering behind all this, kairos, the 'right moment' or fitting occasion, the sense of proportion and timing that no rule can capture but that every real art possesses; Phaedrus's 'when and how much' is kairos made concrete. And the analogy maps onto rhetoric with beautiful precision, as Socrates is about to make explicit. The handbook rhetorician knows the general devices — how to make a proem, how to argue from probability, how to rouse pity — as the pseudo-doctor knows what drugs heat and purge. What he lacks is the knowledge of the particular that would tell him which device to use on which audience, at what moment, to what degree. And that knowledge, for rhetoric, requires two things the handbooks cannot give: knowledge of the truth of the subject (so that one is leading the audience toward something real) and knowledge of the different kinds of soul (so that one knows which kind of speech moves this kind of listener). The doctor treats bodies and must know their kinds and states; the orator treats souls and must know theirs. This is the exact hinge on which the dialogue now turns from demolition to construction: having shown that the handbook art is a heap of remedies without the judgment that makes remedies into medicine, Socrates will now describe the judgment — a science of souls — that would turn the heap into a true art of rhetoric. Phaedrus, in three quick questions, has stated the standard the rest of the dialogue must meet.
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