Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings

6 Ancient Medicine: From Berlin to Baltimore

C H A P T E R S I X Ancient Medicine From Berlin to Baltimore Vivian Nutton The historiography of medicine cannot be studied in isolation from other intellectual and social developments. How historians choose and treat their subjects is affected not only by what seems of interest to them but also by the ways in which others around them write about similar topics. Even within one and the same enterprise, there may be important differences in national styles and national priorities. This chapter focuses on the changing position of Greek and Roman medicine between 1870 and 1939, within both the history of medicine and the discipline of classics or classical philology, as it came to be called in Germany. From being central to the history of medicine, ancient medicine became largely the province of professional classicists, whose interests rarely coincided with those of medical historians. Germany’s defeat in World War I and the subsequent collapse of the financial arrangements that had sustained much German research in ancient medicine almost ended the positivistic production of texts and editions of ancient authors. Younger scholars, like Owsei Temkin and Ludwig Edelstein , turned to the history of ideas, and took this approach with them across the Atlantic to Baltimore in the 1930s. Their immediate impact on historians of medicine and on American classicists was restricted, not least because of the different educational system they encountered. Paradoxically, they found a wider audience 116 Traditions only after Edelstein had died and Temkin had retired from his post as director of the Johns Hopkins Institute, when new concerns and interests within classics, coming mainly from philosophers and from feminists, revived interest in ancient medicine. This story can be interpreted in various ways. In one version, it shows the reduction in importance of the history of ancient medicine within the historiography of medicine in the face of the ‘‘historicizing’’ approach toward medicine ’s past that emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. Before then, the outlines of the history of medicine were largely those laid down by three ancient writers: Cornelius Celsus, whose Preface to his On Medicine surveyed the history of medicine from Hippocrates to Hellenistic Alexandria;1 the Elder Pliny, whose scabrous account of Greek doctors in Republican and early Imperial Rome exercised a powerful influence on all his readers;2 and Galen of Pergamum, whose strident assurance that he alone knew what was true medicine effectively determined what past authors and what developments were considered significant.3 Eighteenth-century antiquarians, like Conyers Middleton (1683–1750) and Johann Heinrich Schulze (1687–1744), supplemented this outline of the distant past with the evidence of archaeology, coins, and inscriptions, and with an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of ancient nonmedical sources.4 The ‘‘pragmatic’’ medical historians of the first third of the nineteenth century adopted a different perspective. Far from rejecting ancient medicine as outdated, they wished to show its relevance to present concerns. Particularly in Germany until the 1840s, the classical texts were still essential reading for the practical information of value that they contained, and the study of the history of Greek and Roman medicine was intimately linked to modern problems. To make available an ancient author, either in the original Greek or Latin or in an accurate translation, was a contribution to medicine and to medical scholarship. The massive program of reprints of ancient texts supervised by Karl Gottlob Kühn at Leipzig in the 1820s, the English translations of Greek texts by the Scottish physician Francis Adams, and (at least in its first volumes) the monumental edition of Hippocrates by Émile Littré, had a practical as well as a historical intent: to provide modern doctors with useful material that they might otherwise neglect or misunderstand.5 This approach to ancient medicine came to an end in the mid-nineteenth century, as developments within medicine made the diagnoses and remedies of the ancients superfluous. The claims of J. P. E. Petrequin (1809–1876) in the 1870s for a return to the true principles of surgery as laid down in his (still valuable) edition of the surgical texts in the Hippocratic corpus must have struck many of Ancient Medicine: From Berlin to Baltimore 117 his medical readers as an old-fashioned and chauvinist attempt to turn back the clock and forget the achievements of German military surgery.6 The new historicist approach, represented, for example, in the volumes of...