The Pineal Gland and the Ancient Art of Iatromathematica

Abstract—The medical astrologers of Ancient Greece: the iatromathematici, and the later European physician-astrologers, assumed a correlation between events in the heavens and those on earth that was relevant to both health and disease. Some of the early practitioners of modern scientific medicine did the same under the aegis of what we might term, proto-cosmobiology, though none could provide an adequate mechanism to explain the nature of the link they believed existed between the skies and ourselves. With the discovery and elucidation of the pineal gland’s functions in the mid twentieth century, which are discussed in detail, we were in a position to provide such a link, and we can now to a great extent explain in conventional scientific terms how those influences of the sun, moon, planets and other ce-lestial phenomena studied by the early iatromathematici and early cosmobi-ologists could, can, and do, affect us