Longrigg - Greek Medicine: From the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age A Source Book

From the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age

A Source Book

James Longrigg

First published in 1998 by
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
The Old Piano Factory
48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB
Tel: 0171 729 5986
Fax: 0171 729 0015

Published in the United States by
Routledge
270 Madison Ave,
New York NY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2010

1998 by James Longrigg

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

CIP data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 0 415 92087 6

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

FOR NANCY WITH AFFECTION & GRATITUDE

I should like to express my great gratitude to the Principal and Fellows of Wolfson College, Oxford for the award of a Charter Fellowship in the History of Science in 1994 which enabled me significantly to advance this work; to the Principal and Fellows of Brasenose College, Oxford and the Hellenic Fund for the award of a Fellowship in Hellenic Studies in 1997 which enabled me to bring it to completion, and to the University of Newcastle for granting me study leave on both occasions.

I should also like to acknowledge the great kindness of Vivian Nutton of the Wellcome Institute and my colleague, Philip van der Eijk, both of whom read an early draft of this work and whose comments proved invaluable. Last, but by no means least, I should like to express my gratitude for help in preparing the indices and for other assistance to my wife to whom this book is affectionately dedicated.

Hamsterley Mill
Durham
1997

One of the most impressive contributions of the ancient Greeks to Western culture was their invention of rational medicine. Up to now this important subject has been difficult to study because of the inaccessibility of source material, which, in addition to being written in the Classical languages, is highly diverse, widely scattered throughout a multiplicity of ancient authors, frequently lacking a modern edition, and, at times, fragmentary and distorted. This Source Book seeks to help to alleviate this problem by providing a collection and translation of some of this fascinating material covering several of the most important aspects of ancient Greek medicine from Homer to the Alexandrians and assembling it in a form where it is more readily accessible to researchers, teachers and students alike.

The primary aim of this book is to set Ancient Greek medicine within its historical and intellectual context by presenting a selection of passages (not all of them, of course, strictly medical, or even Greek) in English translation. Such a policy, it is hoped, will enable one to reveal where, when, and how developments occurred; to trace the fortunes and modifications of individual theories, and to reveal the attitudes and beliefs of individual doctors on particular issues (which is not easily done on the more conventional approach).

It should be stressed that this work is not intended to serve as a General Reader. Nor is it primarily an attempt to illustrate the manifold virtues of Ancient Greek medicine by presenting, in conventional fashion, a selection of texts of outstanding merit or interest. Several such attempts have already been made. Again, it must be pointed out, it is not the aim of this collection to cover the whole of Ancient Greek medicine. (Restrictions of time and space would, in any case, preclude such an ambition.) Comparatively little emphasis, for example, has been accorded to social and practical aspects of Greek medicine not because these aspects are regarded as lacking in importance and interest, but because the desire here is to concentrate most especially upon that aspect of Greek medicine that set it apart from other medical systems its rational and theoretical nature.

The Greeks invented rational medicine. It was they who first evolved rational systems of medicine for the most part free from magical and religious elements and based upon belief in natural causation. The importance of this revolutionary innovation for the subsequent history of medicine can hardly be overstressed. The strikingly rational attitudes introduced here into medicine resulted in a radically new conception of disease, whose causes and symptoms were now accounted for in purely natural terms. These are the elements I wish to accentuate. In this latter connection, I have sought, where appropriate, deliberately to provide overlap with my earlier book, Greek Rational Medicine, in the hope that it might prove helpful to augment the contexts now assembled with the longer commentaries supplied in that earlier work, and, conversely, to augment the latter with the more numerous contexts provided here.

It is inevitable that an author's choice of contexts in a Source Book will not always coincide with that of his readers; inevitably, it will sometimes be felt that better choices could have been made. Frequently, too, this author has himself been unable to include all the passages he would have liked. Again, the actual topics selected may not be to the taste of every reader. Indeed, since Greek medicine was not itself sub-divided into the various specialisms of its modern counterpart, it may be objected that to present this material under a diversity of headings is, strictly speaking, anachronistic. The validity of this objection is freely acknowledged and, by way of atonement, frequent cross-references have been introduced to serve as reminders of the more unitary nature of Greek medicine. Readers are, therefore, cordially invited to add further contexts where they will and, should they wish, to re-arrange the numbers of the passages translated here to form topics of their own choice. It is, in any case, most earnestly hoped that readers will not be content to confine themselves solely to the passages presented here, but that, whenever they are able, they will study them within the larger literary context from which they have severally been drawn.

Finally, a short synopsis covering the subject-matter and crossreferenced to the contexts selected has been added at the end of each chapter.

With the exception of the Near Eastern material all the translations are by the author.