Hippocrates (review)

Jacques Jouanna. Hippocrates. Johns Hopkins Medicine & Culture Series. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xii, 520 pp. 3 maps. $49.95.

This book is both timely and old-fashioned. It is published at a time when classical scholars are more than ever aware of the extent of the influence of medical thought in Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and require an accessible introductory synthesis of current opinion on issues in Hippocratic medicine. Toward this end, in separate sections the book covers the historical Hippocrates, the social status of doctors and clinical medicine, the relationship of medicine and natural philosophy, and the legacy of Hippocrates. Each section has three or four chapters liberally, indeed lavishly, supported by references to the Hippocratic Corpus and other primary sources. The book also includes several useful appendices, most notably a list of all the treatises in the corpus with a brief description of their contents, probable authorship, dates, and editions.

Scholars, though, may find the old-fashioned nature of this book frustrating because the current opinion given throughout is almost exclusively that of the author. Jouanna’s vast knowledge and experience of the Hippocratic Corpus do, of course, make his opinions extremely valuable, and they are generally well founded. The major exception to this is the biographical section where Jouanna makes too free use of the Letters, despite his own caveat that they are “to be used with the greatest caution” (p. 8). But even on issues where Jouanna can marshal numerous texts to support his argument, there are valid alternative interpretations to which the reader should be alerted other than by remarks such as, “I leave to one side here the scholarly debates over what the Hippocratic method may actually have encompassed,” (p. 418, n. 6) or, “without wishing to involve the reader in a quarrel among experts,” (p. 274) when giving his version of pre-Socratic embryology. The two footnotes to this short section cite only passages from Democritus from Diels-Kranz (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker H. Diels, 6th ed., revised with additions by W. Kranz, Berlin, 1952), Hippocrates’ Generation/Nature of the Child, and Aristotle’s Generation of Animals. The supplementary bibliography by chapter is helpful for those wishing to pursue a topic more deeply, but there is a danger that a reader could come away from this book thinking, for example, that the Cos/Cnidos distinction is applied across the board by those working on the Hippocratic Corpus when, in fact, British and American scholars tend to downplay the distinction in comparison to continental scholars.

It should be pointed out that Jouanna does not cite even his own earlier publications. It is as if a great scholar with a lifetime’s familiarity with the texts sat down and dictated his thoughts ex cathedra. Even the relative emphasis given to some of the issues betrays Jouanna’s personal interest rather than the status quaestionis. “Diseases of Women and Their Treatment” receives five and a half pages, “Sexual Life” half a page, though both these subjects have been the focus of a huge proportion of recent scholarship in Hippocratic literature.

The book is refreshing in that Jouanna seems to feel almost on personal terms with Hippocrates, and it is a good introduction to the subject in terms of the number of issues he addresses and the breadth of citation from the primary sources. The decision not to include many references to other interpretations than Jouanna’s was obviously taken deliberately, and mistakenly in my view, but the opinion we are left with is that of a scholar with a deep knowledge of and warmth for the subject, to which we should pay due attention.

Reviewed by Lesley Dean-Jones, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor of Classics,
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712.

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