Champollion never had the opportunity to decipher a medical papyrus. In his days, Egyptian medicine was known indirectly, notably through information from the Greeks, in particular Herodotus. The situation changed completely during the second half of the nineteenth century following the discovery and publication of Egyptian medical papyri. The first was the Berlin papyrus, published by Heinrich Brugsch in 1863; some ten years later, in 1875, the most important medical text from ancient Egypt, the Ebers papyrus (named after its owner and editor) cast light on general pathology. A particular aspect of Egyptian medicine, gynaecology, was subsequently revealed by the...

Although Plato was the first Greek thinker to refer in a systematic manner to the art of the doctor as a model for the art of the politician, he was not the first Greek writer to compare the leader of a city with a doctor. For example, Pindar’s FourthPythian Ode , written in 462–461, compares the king of Cyrene, Arcesilaus IV, with a doctor (line 270, ιατήρ) , when he asks for clemency towards to the exile Damophilus, in a passage where the four terms of the Platonic analogy are already implicitly present: the political leader corresponds to the...

The second half of the fifth century BC is characterised by the birth and development of various arts, or .τέχυαι.¹ Amongst these arts, rhetoric and medicine do not seem to share anything in common: one of them is the art of persuasion with speech, the other is the art of healing bodies with medicine. However, there were close relationships and reciprocal influences between these two arts. The influence of medicine on rhetoric is well-known. In the fifth century, Gorgias, in hisEncomium of Helen , compared the power of speech on the soul with the power of drugs, on the body.²...

It is well-known that the ‘Age of Pericles’ was also the Golden Age of Greek tragedy, whose evolution we can follow from Aeschylus’Persians in 471 BC to Sophocles’Oedipus at Colonus , staged in 401. It is less well-known that this is also the Golden Age of Greek medicine. The Greek doctor Hippocrates, who was born in 460 BC and died around 370 BC, originated from the island of Cos and came from a family of Asclepiads. If we may believe Plato, his younger contemporary, by the end of the fifth century his fame as a doctor was already similar...

It is well known that the rational understanding of disease that we find in the Hippocratic Corpus contrasts with a much older conception that is represented in Greek tragedy. Since the subjects of Greek tragedy are mythical, the belief in the divine origin of disease is widespread, and the important healing figures are gods. By contrast, Hippocratic doctors explain disease by natural causes and reject any intervention of an anthropomorphic divinity; and their therapeutic action combats the cause of the disease through rational meansࢮ

Although the understandings of disease in medical literature and in tragedy are clearly far apart, a...

The term ‘Hippocrates’ can have two meanings: in a narrow sense, it refers to the classical Greek doctor, a contemporary of Socrates, who originally came from the island of Cos and belonged to a family of Asclepiads. His fame in his own lifetime is attested by two references in Plato’sProtagoras andPhaedrus . In a wider sense, ‘Hippocrates’ refers to the collection of some sixty medical writings transmitted under his name in medieval manuscripts. Although we might reasonably attribute some of these writings to Hippocrates’ hand (without having absolute criteria with which to identify them), it is clear that not...

The Greek wordmiasma , which still survives in English, was described by Émile Littré, the editor of Hippocrates who is best known for hisDictionnaire de la langue française as a ‘medical term’. He gives it the following meaning: “Fumes that originate from organic substances and which, spreading through the air and attaching themselves to certain bodies, exercise a pernicious influence on animals. In particular, unpleasant smells that originate from certain contagious diseases. Variolous and pestilential miasmas.”

However, the Greek wordmiasma was not originally a medical term. Derived from the verbmiaino , which means ‘to stain’ (for example with...

In the classical Greek literature that pre-dates the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, descriptions of dietary practice are particularly numerous in comedy, because it is a reflection of daily life. It is perfectly appropriate that a paper in this colloquium be dedicated to it.¹ The historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and later Xenophon, also give passing descriptions of the regimen of men or peoples. However, medical texts are the most important witness we have for the regimen of the classical Greeks, whether in health or sickness. Indeed, it is in the corpus of the sixty or so medical treatises attributed to Hippocrates,...

Airs, Waters, Places is the only treatise from the Hippocratic Corpus that devotes substantial discussion to the effects of the internal usage of water on health and disease.¹ Elsewhere, in some of the dietetic treatises, we find brief discussions of water. For example, the author ofRegimen in Acute Diseases devotes a short passage to water as a drink, but this is only from the perspective of the treatment of acute diseases. More surprising is the fact that the treatiseRegimen , which contains the most detailed catalogue of foods and drinks in the Hippocratic Corpus, dedicates only one pithy and...

In an attempt to dispel the grief caused by the death of loved ones, Helen pours into the crater that was used for drinking an ingenious remedy that came from Egypt, the land of the most knowledgeable doctors in the world, who descend from Paeon, the doctor of the gods. This passage from theOdyssey (4,219 ff.) is well known, and is the first attestation in Greek literature of a remedy against love sickness. However, what is less well known is the reading of this passage by a Greek doctor who lived between Hippocrates and Galen, Rufus of Ephesus (first...

Among the sixty or so medical treatises preserved under the name of Hippocrates, the treatiseRegimen , despite its title, is not entirely dedicated to what ancient doctors meant by regimen. Whilst in book 2 (chs. 37–66) we find the most developed and systematic catalogue in the Hippocratic Corpus on the natural and artificial properties of the various ingredients of regimen (which, according to the ancients, comprised not only food and drink, but also exercise), the work’s content is much richer and more diverse. The author of Regimen dedicates his entire first book (chs. 1–36) to a discussion of...

In a colloquium on melancholy in the modern world, this paper may well be considered out of place. However, I am very grateful to the organisers for welcoming these thoughts on the origins of melancholy and the melancholic temperament in Greek medicine. They may be helpful in showing the difference(s) between ancient and modern understandings of melancholy. In any case, they provide a good occasion for a critical examination of the way in which the relevant concepts and technical terms are established and perpetuated in the medical tradition, quite independently from the philosophical tradition. My paper will also make use...

Galen often refers to the ancients in order to judge the moderns; they are a point of reference, even in an art such as medicine, where progress might negate the need to refer to the men of the past. Amongst these men of the past, the one that occupies the most eminent place in medicine is also the oldest: Hippocrates. Of course, Galen was not the only admirer of Hippocrates during his time. Even if we take into account contemporary detractors of Hippocratic medicine, in particular the Methodists, admiration for Hippocrates and interest in his work was widespread in Galen’s...

Galen tells us that he had discussed the meaning of the word ‘nature’ in the fifth book of a work calledMedical Names , a treatise that is now lost.¹ This loss is regrettable, but it is compensated by Galen’s scattered discussions of the meanings of the term, which he sometimes analyses, particularly when he encounters it in the Hippocratic texts on which he is commenting.

In the first part of this paper, we will consider Galen the philologist, and examine some important passages where he discusses the meaning of φΰσις (‘nature’), or the expression χατά φΰσις (‘according to nature’). In...

More than any other medical writer from Greek antiquity, it was Galen who by means of his extensive oeuvre—which comprises more than ten percent of all Greek literature that has survived from Homer to the end of the second century AD—contributed most effectively to the spread of the work attributed to his precursor, Hippocrates, a doctor from the fifth century BC, whom he considers the most eminent of all the ancient doctors who preceded him. In particular, he wrote commentaries on several Hippocratic treatises, amongst them a commentary onThe Nature of Man .¹

I have selected this commentary...

The theory of the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile) first appears in a fifth-century BC Hippocratic treatise calledThe Nature of Man , the only treatise from the Hippocratic Corpus to which we can attribute an author’s name. It is the work of Polybus, Hippocrates’ student and sonin-law. Here, we see for the first time a very clear expression of the idea that the nature of man consists of four humours,¹ and that the properties of each of these correspond to each of the four seasons, each humour predominating in the season which shares the same nature: blood,...