Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers (Studies in Ancient Medicine)

Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers (Studies in Ancient Medicine)

Language: English

Pages: 404

ISBN: 9004208593

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This volume makes available for the first time in English translation a selection of Jacques Jouanna's papers on medicine in the Graeco-Roman world. The papers cover more than thirty years of Jouanna s scholarship and range from the early beginnings of Greek medicine to late antiquity. Part One studies the ways in which Greek medicine is related to its historical and cultural background (politics, rhetoric, drama, religion). Part Two studies a number of salient features of Hippocratic medicine, such as dietetics, theories of health and disease and concepts of psychosomatic interaction, in relation to Greek philosophical thought. Part Three studies the reception of Hippocratic medicine, especially medical ethics and the theory of the four humours, in Galen and in late antiquity."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

position on wine remains essential in the history of Greek medicine and should serve as a basis for a discussion of wine in the medical thought of ancient Greece. “There is no topic more difficult to handle, or more full of detail, seeing that it is hard to say whether wine does good to people rather than harming them,” declares Pliny the Elder in his discussion of the therapeutic properties of wine.11 Despite the importance and abundance of material on the subject, it is surprising to see that

divided into two types: local diseases, which are explained by the orientation of the city to the winds and the sun and by the nature of the various kinds of water (which would later be called endemic diseases), and more general diseases, which correspond to epidemic diseases. The author expressly says that these more general diseases are caused by a change in seasons (what we would call climate), i.e. by variations in the elemental quality of the air (hot, cold, dry, wet).14 Thus, air affects

general remarks on what doctors in the classical period understood by diaita allow us to see that the French word ‘diète’ has a more restricted meaning than the Greek word diaita from which it derives, since it usually refers only to the diet of patients. Moreover, it shows that the title of the conference in which this paper was presented, ‘Alimentary practices and discourses’ only partially corresponds with ancient doctors’ understanding of diet. For ancient doctors, food was only one part of

“manure,” alluding to the cereals that sprout from the ground, and he adds that their life would be shorter still if the harmful effect of their diet was not partially compensated for by the beneficial effect of their drink. I thank Paul Demont for drawing this passage to my attention. 146 chapter eight discoveries of diets for patients. It is the first history of dietetics that is available to us in western thought.24 In the beginning, the first men had a diet that was similar to that of

line. Good health, like happiness, is uneventful. What, then, is the subject matter of almost the entire passage? It is a kind of physical treatise on the formation of rain water, which is longer than the medical monograph on lithiasis. A comparison of the structure of these two subsections shows us that one of the original features of this treatise, which is a fundamental text on the connections between water and health, is that medical knowledge is coupled with the knowledge of the ‘natural

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