Greek Medical Literature and Its Readers: From Hippocrates to Islam and Byzantium ed. by Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Sophia Xenophontos (review)

This compact collection arises from a conference held at King's College London in 2014. Its aim is "to make an important contribution to understanding the role of the audience in the contextualisation of Greek medical texts by looking into the interaction between authors and readers and offering insights into how the author's background, experience, and skills condition his readership, methodology, and mode of exposition" (p. 1). In many respects, this ambition is fulfilled, although more often than not it is the audience that shapes the text, rather than the opposite. Through nine chapters focusing on authors spreading from Hippocrates to the medieval readers of Galen, and covering such diverse areas as classical Greece, Byzantium, and the Islamic world, the volume offers an interesting array of concise case studies, all focusing on the main question asked from them, namely the relationship between author and audience.

The first chapter, by Stavros Kouloumentas, illustrates the difficulties inherent to interpreting any ancient text lacking a clear context to build on. The chapter focuses on a fragment of Alcmaeon held in a third-century CE source, Diogenes Laertius. Beyond the difficulty of building anything solid on such a late source, the author, with the help of Hippocratic comparanda, competently highlights possible avenues to identify the audience of the original text (both fragmentary and badly preserved). His interpretation remains, to an extent, open, but provides a welcome illustration of the textual and interpretative problems faced by readers of ancient medicine, particularly in the classical period. It is therefore a very good way to open up the collection. In the following chapters (which cannot all be described within this review), more practical aspects of the author-reader relationship are explored, notably by Uwe Vagelpohl in his study of Hunayn's efforts to adapt the original Greek text to new audiences. Vagelpohl's conclusions could apply to similar efforts in other languages, but Hunayn's exceptional mastery is rightly emphasized. Adaptative strategies are also at the heart of Bouras-Vallianatos' study of the readers of Galen's Ad Glauconem (one of the most influential Galenic works of the medieval period) in Byzantium. Meanwhile, other chapters emphasize a shift in the presentation of the material; for instance, Elvira Wakelnig's study shows clearly how the theological and philosophical uses of Galen's hymn to Nature, De usu partium, turn it into a hymn to the Creator in several Arabic texts. Although this study doesn't exhaust the vast potential of a study of the reception of Galen's masterpiece in the Islamic world (or indeed across cultures), it certainly stresses an important feature of medical texts: their endless plasticity toward new reader-ships, shaped by different religious and cultural contexts. Sophia Xenophontos appropriately explores the ethical/rhetorical dimension of Galen's Protreptic, a welcome addition to existing literature on the deontological aspect of medical writing, and on the genre of protreptics. In this as in Laurence Totelin's speculative inquiry into the possibility of laughter in Hippocratic literature (namely the Winds), we get a glimpse of the potentially broader appeal of medical literature and, subsequently, of a broader enquiry into the rhetoric of medical texts.

The material of certain chapters is quite broad, such as Chiara Thumiger's study of the Hippocratic Epidemics. She highlights well-chosen features of the texts to show that they were aimed at professionals, to the exclusion of any lay audience; as she does not dip into the relatively important differences between the three blocks (or, as it were, authors) of the collection, one is left to wonder whether interesting variations could have been identified.

The authors could not always resolve the issues at hand, for methodological reasons—the lack of critical editions for the texts studied by...