The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (review)

This study by Brooke Holmes is a revised version of the author's doctoral thesis, completed under the supervision of Froma Zeitlin and Heinrich von Staden, and it represents a rather unusual blend of the interests of both her mentors. The reader will find abundant discussions of both Greek medical literature and Greek Drama, and visible traces of semiotic theories, of which Zeitlin was a fervent proponent in the 1980s. The primary objective of this book is to study the emergence of the physical body as a concept, and in order to achieve this goal, the author researches a selection of Hippocratic studies, as well as other contemporary authors in the late fifth or early fourth century, most notably Greek Drama and Plato.

The first chapter searches through the Homeric poems for features which later would be attributed to the physical body. The second chapter discusses natural inquiry in presocratic philosophy and its influence on theories of the body in rational medicine. In Chapter 3, the author discusses medical theories about the physical body, especially its perception as a mysterious cavity inviting research into its secrets. Chapter 4 introduces the vital force in connection to physis (nature), while Chapter 5 explores the relation between physis and psyche (soul). The final chapter researches these topics in Greek Drama, with emphasis on Euripides. The author's conclusion that the physical body in the fifth century became a conceptual object which assumed and converted into natural processes many powers and qualities, which until the time of rational medicine belonged to the realm of the divine or the supernatural, is well argued and convincing.

The reader might enjoy the discussions on psychic desires (Chapter 5), or the madness of Heracles (Chapter 6), and find the sections on the dynamics of the cavity (Chapter 3), or the relationship between vision and healing (Chapter 4) particularly intriguing. The author's affinity for verbal complexity and dense writing sometimes proves detrimental to comprehension, and it might take the reader a while to work out the meaning of phrases like "Yet it may be … world" (13) or "But if a book … sense of it" (40). Moreover, the author has a tendency to include very diverse materials from medical literature, poetry, philosophy, and even historiography and oratory all blended together with modern literary and socio-cultural theory into an ambitious composition trying to prove a point which sometimes gets lost in all this (see, for example, page 38, where the argument that the physical body is not only a medical but also a sociopolitical construct is lost in an unnecessarily complicated discussion).

This is a learned study and the author can be meticulous with the detail. For example, she always refers to Hippocratic studies not only by section (which is the standard method in recent years), but also by volume and page of the edition of Littré and also alternative systems of referencing (e.g., Joly, Jouanna, etc.). However, inevitably for a study of this length, there are omissions and errors, some more substantial than others. For example, when Holmes discusses the term "symptom" in the introduction, she correctly asserts that symptôma is only encountered once in the Hippocratic corpus, but then seems to conclude that its use in medical literature is post-Hellenistic. She seems to have missed the use of the term in a clearly medical sense, exactly as Galen and his successors would have used it, in the biological works of Aristotle (e.g., Categoriae 9 b 20 referring to paler or darker hues of the soma; De Divinatione per Somnia 462 b 27 referring to dreams). Aristotle seems to be the author who deserves credit for introducing the usage of "symptom" as we know it in medicine. Moreover the primary meaning of the term before Aristotle as "calamity" which befalls someone (Latin casus) could be relevant for the arguments of the author (e...