Mé decine et morale dans l'antiquité (review)

Hellmut Flashar and Jacques Jouanna, eds. Médecine et morale dans l'antiquité. Entretiens sur l'antiquité classique, no. 43. Proceedings of a conference in Geneva, 19-23 August 1996. Geneva: Fondations Hardt, 1997. viii + 415 pp. No price given.

In August 1996 nine invited scholars met under the auspices of the Fondation Hardt for five days near Geneva, Switzerland, to present and discuss papers centered around the theme "medicine and morality in classical antiquity." It is these essays (two in English, three in German, and four in French) and the untranslated trilingual discussion they generated, along with a final presentation recounting an episode in the history of Renaissance medical scholarship in Geneva, that constitute the present volume.

The scholars and their topics are as follows: Hellmut Flashar (Ger.), "Ethics and Medicine: Modern Problems and Ancient Roots"; Vivian Nutton (Eng.), "Hippocratic Morality and Modern Medicine"; Thomas Ruetten (Ger.), "Medical-Ethical Themes in the Deontological Writings of the Hippocratic Collection"; Charlotte Schubert (Ger.), "Concepts of Man and the Evolution of Ethics in Classical Greece"; Heinrich von Staden (Eng.), "Character and Competence: Personal and Professional Conduct in Greek Medicine"; Jacques Jouanna (Fr.), "Galen's Reading of Hippocratic Ethics"; Jackie Pigeaud (Fr.), "The Philosophical Foundations of Medical Ethics: The Case of Rome"; Philippe Mudry (Fr.), "Ethics and Medicine in Rome: The Preface to Scribonius Largus, or the Establishment of a Uniqueness"; Antonio Garzya (Fr.), "Science and Conscience in the Practical Medicine of Late Antiquity and Byzantium"; Olivier Reverdin (Fr.), "The Dioscorides Edition (1598) of Jean-Antoine Sarasin."

A fundamental problem, which this table of contents will perhaps suggest, and which Nutton raises explicitly at the beginning of the discussion of the first paper (p. 20), is the divergent positions that the colloquium's participants might--and in fact do--hold on the purposes of their presentations. Three potential aims of a discussion relating to "medicine and morality in classical antiquity" are (1) the scholarly elucidation of an important aspect of ancient thought, as an end in itself (sometimes pejoratively called "antiquarianism"--see Flashar, p. 4); (2) the "description of past relationships between doctor and patient for the general instruction of the [modern] medical professional" (Nutton, p. 20); and (3) the consideration of "Hippocratic medicine, Hippocratic ethics, or, more precisely, the Hippocratic Oath, as the roots of modern ethics, a formulation which implies [that] without these roots any ethical system is bound to be unsatisfactory" (Nutton, p. 20).

Because this divergence of purpose was neither faced squarely at the outset by the organizers of the colloquium, nor adequately taken into account in the editing of its transactions, the chapters in the resulting book will vary considerably in their appeal to individual readers according to which of these, or which other, approaches they themselves bring to the subject. While Flashar, Nutton, and Ruetten, for example, all explore the use to which ancient medical texts have been put in specific, mainly modern, ethical discussions, von Staden and Schubert seek as classicists to set Greek thought on medical ethics into its contemporary political, social, and religious context, and Jouanna, Pigeaud, and Mudry investigate various reworkings of Hippocratic ethical material in the Roman medical world, in an essentially historical mode.

As regards the originality, significance, and readability of the ten papers, the range found in Médecine et morale is no greater than one has come to expect in enterprises of this sort. Four papers are major contributions to knowledge and will no doubt become standard points of reference in the ongoing discussion (Nutton, von Staden, Jouanna, Mudry), while most of the others are certainly stimulating and informative. Classicists and historians of ancient medicine will find much here to delight and instruct them. For medical practitioners and bioethicists I would guess there is less of interest, although perhaps enough to repay a selective perusal.

Paul Potter
University of Western Ontario

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