Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T12:32:38.677Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reading Communities and Hippocratism in Hellenistic Medicine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2015

Marquis Berrey
Marquis Berrey*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Argument

The sect of ancient Greek physicians who believed that medical knowledge came from personal experience also read the Hippocratic Corpus intensively. While previous scholarship has concentrated on the contributions of individual physicians to ancient scholarship on Hippocrates, this article seeks to identify those characteristics of Empiricist reading methodology that drove an entire medical community to credit Hippocrates with medical authority. To explain why these physicians appealed to Hippocrates’ authority, I deploy surviving testimonia and fragments to describe the skills, practices, and ideologies of the reading community of ancient Empiricist physicians over the one-hundred year period 175 to 75 BCE. The Empiricist conception of testimony taken on trust operative within that reading community elided the modern distinction between personal and institutional targets of trust by treating Hippocratic writings as revelatory of the moral character of Hippocrates as an author. Hippocrates’ moral character as an honest witness who accurately observed empirical phenomena aligned with the epistemic virtues of an empirical medical community who believed that medical knowledge came from personal experience. So I argue that Empiricist reading culture constructed a moral authority of honesty and accuracy from Hippocratic writings, enlarged the personal authority of Hippocrates among medical readers, and contributed to the development of Hippocratism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 465 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Berrey, Marquis. 2014. “Early Empiricism, Therapeutic Motivation, and the Asymmetrical Dispute Between the Hellenistic Medical Sects.” Apeiron 47 (2):141–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bing, Peter. [1988] 2008. The Well-Read Muse. Ann Arbor: Michigan Classical Press.Google Scholar
Daston, Lorraine. 2012. “The Sciences of the Archive.” Osiris 27:156–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deichgräber, Karl. 1965. Die griechische Empirikerschule: Sammlung der Fragmente und Darstellung der Lehre, 2nd edition. Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung.Google Scholar
Fichtner, Gerhard, et al. 2013. Corpus Hippocraticum: Biographie der hippokratischen und pseudohippokratischen Werke, erweiterte und verbesserte Ausgabe, März 2011. Corpus Medicorum Graecorum/Latinorum. http://cmg.bbaw.de/online-publikationen/hippokrates_2013_02.pdf (last accessed 29 December 2013).Google Scholar
Fischer, Steven. 2003. A History of Reading. London: Reaktion Books.Google Scholar
Fraser, Peter. 1972. Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Frede, Michael. 1990. “An Empiricist View of Knowledge: Memorism.” In Epistemology: Cambridge Companions to Ancient Thought, edited by Everson, Stephen, 225–250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Guardasole, Alessia. 1997. Eraclide di Taranto: Frammenti, testo critico, introduzione, traduzione e commento. Napoli: D’Auria.Google Scholar
Hanson, Ann Ellis. 2010. “Doctors’ Literacy and Papyri of Medical Content.” In Hippocrates and Medical Education, edited by Horstmanhoff, Manfred, 187–204. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henderson, Jeffrey. 1991. The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, Richard. 2012. Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature: The Silent Stream. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutchinson, Gregory. 2008. Talking Books: Readings in Hellenistic and Roman Books of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, William. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Empire: A Study of Elite Reading Communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Steve. 2014. “A New History of Libraries and Books in the Hellenistic Period.” Classical Antiquity 33 (2):347–393.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jouanna, Jacques. 1999. Hippocrates, translated by DeBevoise, Malcolm B.. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.Google Scholar
Kudlien, Fridolf. 1972. “Zeuxis (7).” In Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, edited by Pauly, August, Wissowa, Georg, et al., vol. 2.19, 386–387. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.Google Scholar
Kudlien, Fridolf. 1989. “Hippokrates-Rezeption im Hellenismus.” In Die hippokratischen Epidemien. Theorie-Praxis-Tradition, edited by Baader, Gerhard and Winau, Rolf, 355–376. Stuttgart: Sudhoffs Archiv.Google Scholar
Kühn, Carl Gottlieb. 1821–1833. Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia. Lipsiae: Car. Cnoblochii.Google Scholar
LSJ = Liddell, Henry George, and Scott, Robert. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th edition, revised by Jones, Henry Stuart, supplement edited by Glare, P.G.W.. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mansfeld, Jaap. 1994. Prolegomena: Questions to Be Settled before the Study of an Author, or a Text. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nachmanson, Ernst. 1918. Erotiani Vocum Hippocraticarum Collectio Cum Fragmentis. Uppsala: Appelbergs Boktryckeri-Aktiebolag.Google Scholar
Nagy, Gregory. 2004. Homer's Text and Language. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Nutton, Vivian. 2012. Ancient Medicine, 2nd edition. New York / London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rengakos, Antonios. 2002. “Review of Martin L. West, Studies in the Text and Transmisssion of the Iliad.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2002.11.15. <http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2002/2002–11–15.html> (last accessed December 12, 2014).+(last+accessed+December+12,+2014).>Google Scholar
Schiefsky, Mark. 2005. Hippocrates On Ancient Medicine: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapin, Steven. 1994. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Singer, Peter, et al. 2014. Galen: Psychological Writings: Avoiding Distress, Character Traits, The Diagnosis and Treatment of the Affections and Errors Peculiar to Each Person's Soul, The Capacities of the Soul Depend on the Mixtures of the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Wesley. 1979. The Hippocratic Tradition. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Wesley. 1990. Hippocrates: The Pseudepigraphic Writings. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Sorabji, Richard. 1972. Aristotle on Memory. Providence: Duckworth.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
von Staden, Heinrich. 1975. “Experiment and Experience in Hellenistic Medicine.” Bulletin for the Institute of Classical Studies 22:178–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
von Staden, Heinrich. 1982. “Heresy and Hairesis: The Case of the haireseis iatrikai.” In Jewish and Christian Self-Definition III: Self-Definition in the Greco-Roman World, edited by Meyer, Ben F. and Sanders, Ed Parish, 76–100, 199–206. London: Fortress Press.Google Scholar
von Staden, Heinrich. 1989. Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
von Staden, Heinrich. 1992. “Lexicography in the third century B.C.: Bacchius of Tanagra, Erotian, and Hippocrates.” In Tratados hippocráticos (Estudios acerca de su contenido, forma e influencia): Actas del VIIe colloque international hippocratique (Madrid, 24–29 de septiembre de 1990), edited by López Férez, Juan Antonio, 549–569. Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.Google Scholar
von Staden, Heinrich. 2002. “A Woman Does Not Become Ambidextrous: Galen and the Culture of the Scientific Commentary.” In The Classical Commentary: Histories, Practices, Theory, edited by Gibson, Roy and Kraus, Christina, 109–140. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
von Staden, Heinrich. 2006. “Interpreting ‘Hippokrates’ in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.” In Ärzte und ihre Interpreten: Medizinische Fachtexte der Antike als Forschungsgegenstand der Klassischen Philologie, edited by Müller, Carl Werner, Brockmann, Christian, and Brunschön, Carl Wolfram, 15–47. Leipzig: K.G. Saur.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
von Staden, Heinrich. 2009. “Staging the Past, Staging Oneself: Galen on Hellenistic Exegetical Traditions.” In Galen and the World of Knowledge, edited by Gill, Christopher, Whitmarsh, Tim, and Wilkins, John, 132–156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stok, Fabio. 1993. “La scuola medica Empirica a Roma. Problemi storici e prospettive di ricerca.” In Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, edited by Haase, Wolfgang, vol. 2.37.1, 600–645. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Stok, Fabio. 2008. “Zeuxis.” In The Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and its Heirs, edited by Keyser, Paul and Irby-Massie, Georgia, 848. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Svenbro, Jesper. 1993. Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sztompka, Piotr. 2000. Trust: A Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vasunia, Phiroze. 2001. The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
West, Martin. 2001. Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. München: K.G. Saur.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yunis, Harvey. 2011. Plato: Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Zadorojnyi, Alexei. 2013. “Libraries and paideia in the Second Sophistic: Plutarch and Galen.” In Ancient Libraries, edited by König, Jason, Oikonomopoulou, Katerina, and Woolf, Greg, 377–400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar