Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece: From Antiquity to the Present ed. by Steven M. Oberhelman (review)
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This volume offers a diachronic collection of articles concerning the role of dreams in medical practice in ancient Greece and beyond. It contains fourteen articles, which discuss a wide spectrum of subjects, but the result is a unified volume that offers a coherent overview of the subject and the current scholarly trends. [End Page 742]
Steven M. Oberhelman offers a firm grid to the subject in his introduction to this volume. Starting from the methodological tools now available from the fields of anthropology and sociology, alongside their merits and shortcomings, Oberhelman guides his readers through this complicated body of knowledge. He then proceeds to discuss the types of sources available, set a chronological framework for the volume, and demonstrate how valuable diachronic study can be. The interpretation of dreams, Oberhelman explains, fell into the hands of various authorities. This current volume concerns the role of the understanding of dreams in the field of medicine, and the introduction offers an informative sketch of ancient medicine, in terms of ideas and authorities.
The second chapter, by Maithe A. A. Hulskamp, discusses the value of dream diagnosis in the medical praxis of Hippocrates and Galen (pp. 33–68). Hulskamp begins with the Hippocratic corpus with particular focus on Regimen 4 and its relation to other Hippocratic treatises. She then discusses the physiology of dreams in the Hippocratic corpus (pp. 48–51) and dreams as symptoms (pp. 51–53). The second section of the chapter discusses dreams in the work of Galen (pp. 54–68) with specific attention to their connection with the humor system and their function in diagnosis.
The third chapter, by Louise Cilliers and François Pieter Retief, focuses on dream healing in Asclepieia in the Mediterranean (pp. 69–107). This subject, which has been extensively discussed before, is presented here with remarkable clarity. The authors begin with a source analysis and the interrelation between the cult of Asclepius to medicine at large (pp. 69–74). They continue with an examination of the profile of the patients and the types of therapy offered. The second part of the chapter examines the cult of Asclepius from a medical point of view, which, unlike many other works, does not exclude modern medical notions.
The fourth chapter, by Lee T. Pearcy, examines the writing of medical dream in the Hippocratic Corpus and at Epidaurus (pp. 93–107). Pearcy offers an intriguing account of the rise of medical dreams in the context of the rise of technical medicine, and the classification of certain dreams as medical, as an indication of the victory of doctors who claimed possession of techne (p. 94).
The fifth chapter, by Janet Downie, offers an account of dream hermeneutics in Aelius Aristides’s Hieroi Logoi (pp. 109–27). Through an analysis of the syntax of the narrative of the Hieroi Logoi and an examination of two cases of an interpretative failure, Downie shows that Aristides was aware of a method of dream interpretation. She concludes that “Aristides brings into focus a fundamental problem that haunts Greek treatises on dreams hermeneutics: the difficulty of determining a dream’s horizon of interpretation” (p. 127).
The sixth chapter, by Christine Walde, concerns illness and its metaphors in Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica: a negative list (pp. 129–57). The aim of Walde is “to provide an overview of how disease figures in the Oneirocritica and to describe its associations” (p. 130). The result is an impressive analysis of all mentioning of illness in the work of Artemidorus and their interpretation.
The next five essays focus on Byzantium. Chapter 7, by Ildikó Csepregi, considers who is behind incubation stories—the hagiographers of Byzantine dream-healing [End Page 743] miracles (pp. 161–87). The aim of Csepregi is to draw a distinction between narrative and narrator in the relevant materials and to bring to light some of the unique problems hagiography entails.
The eighth chapter, by Stavroula Constantinou...
