Alcmaeon (c. early to mid 5th century BC)

Alcmaeon of Croton was a Greek thinker with philosophical and medical interests. His work focused on the nature of man. Health was the outcome of ‘equal rights’ between, for example, hot and cold, moist and dry, disease that of the ‘monarchy’ of one of them. ‘Passages’ linked the sense organs to the brain, which Alcmaeon took to be the seat of sensation and understanding. Plato followed him in this view, as also in his proof of the immortality of the soul from its continual motion.