Places in Man (review)

Hippocrates. Places in Man. Edited and translated with introduction and commentary by Elizabeth M. Craik. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. xxiii + 259 pp. Ill. $85.00.

On a simple word-count, Elizabeth Craik notes, Places in Man ranks as the eleventh longest of the seventy-odd treatises that make up the Hippocratic Corpus. It is, moreover, extremely wide-ranging, covering aspects of anatomy, physiology, and gynecology, together with the causation and cure of disease, and a number of general points about the nature and practice of medicine; and it has also had an integral and significant part to play in the Hippocratic tradition. Even more interestingly, Craik suggests--based on linguistic and stylistic grounds, as well as those of content and approach--not only a very early date for this text (probably somewhere in the first half of the fifth century b.c.), but also an origin in the Western Greek world. That is, she considers it to have been composed in one of the Greek cities of southern Italy or Sicily (such as Croton or Locri), which are known to have been centers of intellectual and medical activity in the early period, but which are not known to have contributed works to the Hippocratic Corpus itself (thought hitherto to have been a largely Eastern Greek, or Ionian, enterprise). If she is correct in these respects (and her arguments certainly deserve serious consideration), then Places could well be the earliest surviving work of Greek prose, and greater emphasis must now be placed on the extent of the interaction between the different regional medical traditions of the classical Mediterranean.

Even if these proposals are not found persuasive, however, Craik's study of this important, and relatively neglected, Hippocratic treatise is nonetheless most welcome. It consists, in addition to the general introduction in which she describes Places and situates it in its wider context, of a text, a translation, and an extensive commentary. The text is basically that of Robert Joly, slightly amended and complete with apparatus, and Craik's translation is, until some irritating slippage toward the end, printed facing the Greek. The English version is clear and readable, avoiding anachronistic vocabulary as far as possible, and the commentary also counts clarity among its virtues. The attempt is made both to summarize and explain the overall content of each chapter, and to pick up on specific points of language, doctrine, links with other ancient texts and ideas, and so forth. This is commentary on both the text and the translation, as various Greek medical terms and concepts are notoriously difficult to render in any modern language without being seriously misleading.

Thus the views of this Hippocratic author that health and disease depend on the balance of moisture in the body, and its easy movement, emerge clearly on all fronts. But this is a much vaguer notion of somatic moisture than was to be developed in more elaborate humoral theories; its most important manifestation is phlegm, while other fluids, such as bile, get relatively short shrift. It is still a coherent physiology that is being articulated here, however, and the therapies recommended also conform to this overall conceptual framework. Various medicaments, some cautery, and a few dietetic prescriptions are used to moisten, or dry out, the body--again suggesting a more rudimentary therapeutic repertoire than was eventually to be established within Hippocratic medicine.

All this, for Craik, strengthens the notion that Places is genuinely and interestingly archaic, an earlier and somewhat inchoate stage in the development of more elaborate Hippocratic doctrines. It could, of course, be taken as a further indication of the synchronic diversity of ancient Greek medicine (within a more broadly shared set of assumptions), rather than its lines of chronological development. Either way, the value of this study is obvious, in terms of both its clear presentation of the treatise, and its wider suggestions about the Hippocratic world.

Rebecca Flemming
King's College
London

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