Das Kind und seine Krankheiten in der griechischen Medizin: Von Aretaios bis Johannes Aktuarios (1. bis 14. Jahrhundert) (review)

Christine Hummel. Das Kind und seine Krankheiten in der griechischen Medizin: Von Aretaios bis Johannes Aktuarios (1. bis 14. Jahrhundert). Medizingeschichte im Kontext, no. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. xiii + 353 pp. $56.95 (paperbound).

As interest in the history of medicine becomes as specialized as medicine itself, those interested in ancient medicine may be at a disadvantage: the available material does not present itself according to current specialty divisions, and case histories often present a diagnostic challenge because they lack the kind of detail that the clinician considers an essential part of the particular illness and the accompanying physical examination. Although there are treatises on specific topics, the material of the Hippocratic Corpus, for example, is not readily accessible either systemically or systematically.

Thanks to the formidable Theasaurus Linguae Graecae, which is endeavoring to place all available Greek literature on CD-ROM, at least one edition of most extant texts is readily and compactly available in the original Greek. The TLG CD-ROM Version D is the source of the material searched by Christine Hummel for her volume describing children's illnesses in the medical literature from the first through the fourteenth centuries. By using key words relating to the child (pai~, paidivon, paidavrion, brevfo~, nhvpio~) in the various stages of growth and development recognized by the ancient authors, Hummel identified the passages pertinent to her work, and appropriate editions were selected for further analysis. Students of several disciplines, therefore, but especially pediatricians and medical historians interested in children and their illnesses in late antiquity and Byzantine times, will benefit from this publication, which appears as the first volume in the series Medizingeschichte im Kontext, edited by Ulrich Tröhler and Karl-Heinz Leven. This series is a resumption of the one established by Ludwig Aschoff in 1938-39, and extended by Eduard Seidler with the seventeen volumes of Freiburger Forschungen zur Medizingeschichte from 1971 to 1994.

Hummel has performed yeoman service by providing a tripartite compilation of medical writers, their various thoretical constructs, and their decriptions of diseases, arranged primarily by organ system. Part 1 contains brief biographies and short descriptions of the works of the twenty-one included authors; arranged chronologically, they are Aretaius, Soranus, Favorinus, Galen, Philumenus, Leonides, Pseudo-Alexander, Orebasios, Cassius Felix, Poseidonius, Caelius Aurelianus, Aetius, Alexander of Tralles, Paul of Aigina, Theophilus Protospatharius, Paulus Nikaius, Leon the Philospher (ninth century), Theophanes Chrysobalantes (Nonnus), Michael Psellos, Symeon Seth, and Johannes Zacharias Actuarius. In addition, Hummel provides a brief discussion of the portions of the Hippocratic Corpus relevant to the childhood illnesses described by the above authors. In part 2 she describes the various theoretical constructs underlying the concept of childhood itself: the stages of childhood from newborn to adolescence, and the underlying physiological changes. Almost all the citations here are from Galen, amd many of these are from Galen's commentaries on Hippocrates.

Part 3 contains the actual descriptions of pathological and pathophysiological conditions, arranged a capite ad calcem. Hummel divides the material into eleven categories: (1) general concepts of diseases at different stages of childhood; (2) fever; (3) head (including eyes, ears, and lymphatics) and brain; (4) thorax and respiratory system; (5) abdomen and gastrointestinal system; (6) urogenital system; (7) skin and vascular system; (8) nervous system; (9) skeletal system; (10) general therapeutics; and (11) children as therapy (i.e., the use of wolf or dog pups laid across the abdomen in cases of abdominal pain; the use of children's urine to wash newborn infants, decried by Soranus).

One can use this book to study select topics. "Fever," for example, is mentioned specifically with respect to children by Galen, Aetius, Leon, and Theophanes Chrysobalantes. The chapter on Aetius reveals that his febrile musings are found along with his discussions of...