Hippocrates in Context (review)

The chosen theme for the eleventh Hippocrates Colloquium was "Hippocrates in Context," and the twenty-nine published contributions have accordingly been arranged into five parts. J. Jouanna begins the first part, on the epistemological context of Hippocratic medicine, with a more refined approach to the interactions between fifth-century medicine and historiography. Three subsequent papers emphasize the epistemological innovation of Ancient Medicine: J. Barton examines the precise nature of the author's arguments for the rejection of postulate-driven medicine; F. Dunn concentrates on the author's unique conception of progress in medicine, placing it within the context of the later sophistic; and M. J. Schiefsky elucidates the work's positive contribution to an experience-based theory of human nature necessary for medicine. The remaining two papers are a reevaluation of the development of "conjectural/stochastic" medicine by V. Boudon-Millot, and a study of the semiotic use and cataloging methods of nonverbal signs by D. Fausti.

The social context of Hippocratic medicine is the theme of part 2. J. Wilkins considers the social context and composition of Regimen II by examining contrasts with similar works, especially by Galen and Diocles. M. Gorrini explores the relationships between Hippocratic "rational" medicine and religious healing practices in Attica. H. Chang offers a study of the spheres in which Hippocratic physicians worked, by examining the economic evidence for the cities mentioned in the Epidemics. J. Laskaris argues that therapies involving excrement and human milk found in the Corpus derive from misunderstandings of their original ritual context. E. Craik analyzes On the Organ of Sight in terms of its relationship to the rest of the Corpus, especially Places in Man, and speculates on its geographic origins. E. D. Nelson offers a close study of the Speech of the Envoy and suggests its identification as an excerpt from Macareus's lost History of Cos.

The papers in part 3 explore the Corpus's relationship with non-Hippocratic medicine. A. Thivel attempts to set the Corpus against his reconstruction of the development of theories of respiration up to Aristotle. F. Le Blay examines the use of analogy to extrapolate the nature of meteorological phenomena from human physiology, identifying its presence in On Sevens as unique in the Corpus. P. Demont considers aspects of Platonic and Aristotelian responses to humoral theory. E. Garcia Novo compares, rather superficially, the ways in which truth is attained in Plato and the Corpus. D. Manetti convincingly reevaluates the evidence for the identification of physicians named Herodicus. D. Nickel argues for the independence of Praxagoras of Cos in relation to Hippocratic pathology. A. Debru searches for Hippocratic influence on Theophrastus's shorter biological works.

Part 4 is devoted to linguistic and rhetorical analyses: of Prorrhetic 2 by T. Stover; of Internal Affections by P. Pérez Canizares; and the verbalization of the principle of opposites in the Corpus by M. Martinez.

A. Hanson begins part 5, on the reception of the Corpus in later antiquity and beyond, with an attempt to explain the presence of high-level medical treatises in find contexts associated with Egyptian priests in Tebtunis as the result of deliberate distribution by a metropolitan elite with property in this village. M. Pardon considers Celsus's passages on eye disease in order to show his improvements on Hippocrates. A. Roselli analyzes the functions and mechanics of Aretaeus of Cappadocia's use of the Corpus. I. Yeo illustrates an aspect of Galen's exploitation of Hippocrates with reference to his theory of the classification of fevers. I. Garofalo examines the textual history of the surviving fragments of Galen's commentary on Humours. A. Guardasole considers evidence for the Byzantine reception of the Corpus provided by a fragment of On Haemorrhoids inserted into two Galenic manuscripts. T. Rütten discusses the circumstances of publication of F. Tissard's recently rediscovered 1508 edition of the Oath...