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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.1 (2003) 195-196



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Roland Andréani, Henri Michel, and Élie Pélaquier, eds. Hellénisme et Hippocratisme dans l'Europe méditerranéenne: Autour de D. Coray.Proceedings of a conference held 20-21 March 1998 in Montpellier. Université de Montpellier III: Centre d'histoire moderne et contemporaine de l'Europe méditerranéenne et de ses périphéries. Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry, 2000. 304 pp. &#8364 22.87 (paperbound, 2-84269-383-3).

Born in Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey), Diamantios Coray (1748-1833) first worked in his family business, the silk trade. An agent of the company in Amsterdam from 1771 to 1778, he then returned to Smyrna; after his parents' deaths he left the business and moved to Montpellier to study medicine (1782-88). In Paris, he lived with great excitement the 1789 Revolution and pursued the study of ancient Greek literature, especially medicine and Hippocrates. As an enlightened intellectual convinced that education contributes to liberty, he actively supported the liberation of Greece from the Ottoman occupation and the Greek independency (1821), by demonstrating both in Europe and in Greece the value of ancient Greek culture. This volume contains twenty papers, divided into three main sections: Coray's activity and society; Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine during the period ca. 1750-ca. 1800; and French Hellenism and Hellenists during Coray's life (the title page of this part is omitted), including a contribution on the Italo-Greek Ugo Foscolo (ca. 1779-1827).

Part 1 concentrates on Coray's literary activity. Only one contribution in part 1, but all in part 2 are devoted to the medical context of Coray's activity, from Lancisi's Hippocratism to nineteenth-century balneotherapy in Languedoc, including the place of ancient medicine in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie; Montpellier Hippocratism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a special analysis of Montpellier vitalism (1770 to 1810/20); the role of Hippocratic theories in the evaluation of pharmaceuticals by the Société Royale de Médecine (1778-93); and Hippocratism in Enlightenment Spain. Part 3 will be of interest to historians of arts, literature and Hellenism rather than to historians of medicine.

At the crossing point of biographical and contextual history, this volume provides readers with a great many details about Coray's life, set in the context of medical and literary activity of the time. With its brief analysis of limited questions, [End Page 195] it illustrates the revival of Hippocratic medicine at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it also depicts the shift of interest in Hippocrates from medical to historical. Stressing the role played by Coray in this transformation, however, the book pertains to the history of medical erudition rather than to the history of medicine.

 



Alain Touwaide
Smithsonian Institution

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