Maladies des femmes. Vol. 4: Livre IV, et index général (review)

Soranos d'Éphèse. Maladies des femmes. Vol. 4: Livre IV, et index général. Translation and commentary by Paul Burguière, Danielle Gourevitch, and Yves Malinas. Collections des Universités de France. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2000. xxviii + 197 pp. Ill. $45.05; F 255.00; e38.87 (2-251-00480-7).

This fourth volume completes Soranus' Gynaikeia I-IV in the Collection des Universités de France (Budé), with Greek text and French translation on facing pages, and it includes the indices nominum et verborum for all four volumes. The series was begun in 1988 as a cooperative effort by a philologist, a historian of medicine, and a medical doctor and has proved immensely useful for its interpretive essays and notes to individual passages, as well as for its Greek text.

Soranus' Gynecology is his only major treatise to survive for the most part in the original Greek, although this sophisticated physician, medical writer, and adherent of the Methodist sect in medicine enjoyed considerable popularity during his life of active practice among the elite classes at Rome (ca. A.D. 98-138) and throughout antiquity, culminating in the late period when a significant number of his treatises were translated into Latin. Depredations of time have, however, conspired to make Book IV, considering gynecological maladies to be rectified by drugs and manual interventions—or surgery in the ancient sense—the most confused and lacunose in the single manuscript from which Soranus' Greek must be extricated (MS Parisinus Graecus 2153, s. XV ex.). The editors here have followed the late Latin translators Caelius Aurelianus and Mustio, as well as the edition of Valentin Rose (1882), rather than that of Johannes Ilberg (1927) and the widely circulating English translation of Ilberg by Owsei Temkin (1956; paperback, 1991), in placing the section on retention of the afterbirth early in Book II. Thus, only the Greek of Soranus' extensive discussions of dystocia and of uterine prolapse remained to be edited in volume 4.

Soranus' program begins, as elsewhere, with definitions of the malady and a critical survey of the etiologies proposed by predecessors, culminating with his own views that, in the case of difficult childbirth, assign causes to the parturient, to the fetus and its presentations, and to the birthing circumstances. After outlining the symptoms for differential diagnosis, his prescriptions for the care of women laboring in dystocia involve gently straightening the impacted fetus for delivery in cephalic or frank breech positions; the section ends with a measure of last resort: dismemberment and extraction of the fetus in order to preserve the life of the mother.

In common with previous editors of Soranus, this team has made use of the gynecological material in Aetius XVI and the Latin translations by Caelius Aurelianus and Mustio as guides for isolating and identifying Soranus' words in the conflated Paris manuscript, while the Latin translators also aid in reestablishing the order of Soranus' chapters. Of the first twenty-seven chapter-headings listed in the table of contents (pinax) that accompanies the Paris manuscript, these editors constituted Soranus' Book I out of the twenty-one that corresponded to chapters in the manuscript proper; but for Book IV, only the chapter-headings 47-54 of the pinax have corresponding Greek text that can be shown to be from Soranus' hand. Even so, the Latin translators and the late Greek compendiasts preserve discussions of maladies that correspond to chapter-headings 129-55 of the pinax, although nothing from Soranus was actually copied into the Paris manuscript. This new edition examines what the Latin translators and the compendiasts present on the reasonable assumption that where their content is particularly close, the agreement derives from what Soranus once wrote. Thus, chapter-headings on genital abnormalities in females to be corrected by surgery are fleshed out with "Soranian" materials that in all likelihood reflect Soranus' views: uterine abscesses, ulcerations, growths, and constrictions; vaginal atresia...