Reinventing Hippocrates (review)

Since antiquity, Hippocrates has been portrayed and used as the father of medicine. Many ancient physicians were named after him, not only through the Greek tradition according to which a grandson received the same name as his paternal grandfather, but also because Greek physicians and even veterinarians wanted to promote their practice and therefore deliberately chose his name as a publicity nickname. Galen did not pretend to be a new Hippocrates, but he assumed he was his true interpreter, and sometimes claimed to understand Hippocrates' prose better than Hippocrates himself! In Enlightenment Montpellier, medical vitalism and neo-Hippocratism attracted such scholars as Adamantios Coray, fleeing from Turkish Greece, who would become the founder of the modern Greek language and the translator and (again true interpreter) of the treatise De aere, aquis et locis. In the present day, Jacques Jouanna, the famous editor and translator of several Hippocratic treatises in both the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum (or CMG, in Berlin) and Collection des Universités de France (or CUF, in Paris), and the biographer of our hero (Hippocrates, English translation 1999), received a prize in Greece that honored him as a new Hippocrates.

Of course, not all these physicians and scholars had the same vision of Hippocrates and his medicine. The aim of this book is precisely to understand how and why a cultural hero has been constantly invented and reinvented; constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed; molded and remolded, according to the cultural, philosophical, social, and political context, or the private and moral background. Its unifying argument, developed by fourteen scholars during a conference held at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, is that the modern picture of Hippocrates emerged in the sixteenth century. Therefore, after a brilliant introduction by David Cantor, the book (based mostly on four Hippocratic treatises: Oath,Epidemics,Ancient Medicine, and Diet), is made up of four parts: (1) The Complexities of Renaissance Constructions of Hippocratism, by Helen King (Hippocrates or Galen as a father?), Thomas Rütten (Vesalius, Harvey . . . and progress in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medicine), and Jole Shackelford (Petrus Severinus and Paracelsian chemical philosophy); (2) The Transformations of Hippocratism in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Britain, by Andrew Cunningham (a new Hippocrates again, Sydenham), Robert Martensen (Hippocrates in a context of religious dispute), and Andrea Rustock (Bacon, Baconianism, and medical meteorology when the New World was discovered); (3) Hippocratism in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century France and North America, by Elizabeth Williams (the decline of Enlightenment ideals in Montpellier and the French revolution), Ann LaBerge (Hippocrates, an obligatory reference for Paris medicine), and John Warner (Hippocrates and his many depictions in antebellum America); (4) Twentieth-century Hippocratic Research, by Susan Lederer (professional morality in America), and George Weisz, David Cantor, and Carsten Timmermann (mostly holism in interwar France, Britain, and Germany).

I regret that the bibliography appears only in the endnotes, which makes it difficult to deal with. The index is very useful, but not perfect (for instance, among writers I personally knew, Grmek's first name was not Mirki but Mirko, and Roselyne Rey appears on p. 15—although she is not in the index). Nevertheless, this is a great book, a very innovative book, or rather, as I see it, the first volume of a great series, for many aspects could be discussed further, and others have not been considered at all. Among the problems, periods, or countries omitted, the most notable are Italy and Greece herself, and the pre-Renaissance period, which is more important than these authors have assumed.