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Hippocrates J A C Q U E S J O U A N N A T R A N S L A T E D BY M. B. DeBevoise The Johns Hopkins University Press BALTIMORE AND LONDON The translation was prepared with the generous assistance of the Association des Etudes Grccques and the French Ministry of Culture. Originally published as Hippocrate, © Librairie Arthcme Fayard, 1992 © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 1999 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London www.press.jhu .edu A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Frontispiece: Portrait of Hippocrates of Cos. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Greek manuscript Z144, folio iov (14th c.). Photo B.N. Librar, Jouanna, Jacques. [Hippocrate. English] Hippocrates / Jacques Jouanna ; translated by M. B. DeBevoise. p. cm — (Medicine and culture) Includes selections from Hippocrates’ works. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-5907-7 (alk. paper) 1. Hippocrates. 2. Medicine, Ancient. 3. Physicians—Biography. I. Hippocrates. Selections. English and Greek. 1998. II. Title. III. Series. R126.H8J6813 1999 6io'.92—dc2J CON TENT S Translators Note ix Preface xi part i • Hippocrates the Asclepiad 1 Hippocrates of Cos 3 2 Hippocrates the Thessalian 25 3 Hippocrates and the School of Cos 42 4 Writings in Search of an Author 56 part 11 • The Physician in the Practice of His Art 5 The Physician and the Public 75 6 The Physician and the Patient 112 7 The Physician and the Disease 141 part hi • Hippocrates and the Thought of His Time 8 Hippocratic Rationalism and the Divine 181 9 Hippocrates and the Birth of the Human Sciences 210 10 Challenges to Medicine and the Birth of Epistemology 243 11 Medicine in Crisis and the Reaction against Philosophy 259 part iv • The Grandeur and Limits of Hippocratism 12 From Observation of the Visible to Reconstruction of the Invisible 291 13 Health, Sickness, and Nature 323 14 The Legacy of Hippocratism in Antiquity 348 List of Abbreviations 367 Appendix 1: The Oath 369 Appendix 2: An Honorary Decree in Praise of a Physician of Cos 370 Appendix 3: The Treatises of the Hippocratic Collection 373 viii Contents Notes Bibliography Index of Passages Cited General Index t r a n s l a t o r ’ s note Citation to the treatises of the Hippocratic Collection is made on the whole with reference to the chapter and section numbering found in Littre’s Grcek- French edition. Because the numbering of these texts occasionally differs in the Greek-English edition prepared over the last eight decades as part of the Loeb Classical Library series by W. H. S. Jones and others, I have indicated this numbering in those cases—and only those cases—where a passage from the Loeb edition is reproduced in the present work; in all other cases, the reader may assume that it is the Littre edition to which reference is made in the notes, as in the relevant entries of the index of passages cited. For ancient authors other than Hippocrates, I have tended to rely on Loeb translations for the sake of convenience and, illusorily perhaps, consistency. In the case of certain writers, however, for instance Aristophanes, I have trans lated directly from the Greek, following the author’s interpretation of the text in preference to alternative renderings in English. In the case of Plato, I have cited to the new Hackett edition of the complete works. For Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, as for historians and dramatists of the classical period, I have drawn upon a variety of other sources. On the vexed question of transliteration and whether to anglicize titles of treatises in Greek and Latin, I join with my predecessors—in view of the highly variable practice that has arisen from the fact that no rule is universally obeyed—and cheerfully admit to embracing inconsistency, almost as a policy. In the main I have romanized Greek personal and place-names in the conven tional manner, with various exceptions sanctioned to one degree or another by tradition: among Hippocrates’ relatives, for example, Epione, Nebros, and Chrysos (though Phaenerete is used); also assorted Persians and, of course, Greek persons and places customarily referred to by their given names. With regard to titles, I have tried to give English versions in the case of major authors, while deferring from time to time to the authority of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, which not infrequently shows a preference for Latin ver sions. Thus Aristotle is cited for the most part in Latin, which I trust will not inconvenience many readers; Galen, on the other hand, whose works, like those of other medical authors of the period, are almost invariably referred to by scholars by their Latin names, I have occasionally Englished. With respect to the titles of the Hippocratic treatises themselves, I have mostly followed the x Translator's Note practice of Jones and his successors, while taking certain small liberties here and there. And with regard to the transliteration of Greek terms in the text, I have followed the author in using a grave accent to indicate the letter eta (as opposed to epsilon) rather than the macron that is customarily placed over this vowel by authors writing in English. Finally, a good amount of bibliographical material has been added to the English edition, reflecting recent literature in the field that has appeared since the books first publication in 1992, together with an index locorum to enable the reader conveniently to locate passages cited in the work. This index has the incidental virtue of serving to cross-reference discrepant citations to the Hippocratic Collection in the Littre and Loeb editions. Because the Loeb translations of Hippocrates are in many instances flawed, or have otherwise been superseded by later scholarship, minor corrections have been made as necessary and indicated in the corresponding notes. Regrettably, it has not been possible to quote from the new English translation of the collection now being prepared by Professor Heinrich von Staden of Yale University. 1 am indebted to Larry Kim, a doctoral candidate in classics at Princeton University, for research assistance and guidance on questions of technical detail; and, most especially, to Jacques Jou anna himself for his careful review of the final draft as well as his patient cooperation in answering a range of queries on matters of substance and interpretation. Whatever errors remain are my responsibility alone. PREFACE “Hippocrates,” Sganarelle declares to Geronte in Moliere’s The Physician in Spite of Himself, “says that we should both keep our hats on.” “Pray tell,” asks Geronte with surprise, “in what chapter?” “In his chapter on hats,” replies Sganarelle learnedly. Hippocrates obviously never wrote a chapter on hats. But Moliere’s joke, which probably stems from the peculiar discussion recorded by biographers about the reasons Hippocrates was pictured with his head covered (see page 39), is symbolic of the mythic aura that still surrounded Hippocrates and his work in the seventeenth century, and even later. Hippocrates, a Greek physician of the fifth century before Jesus Christ, has long been considered the Father of Medicine. Over time he came to be cred ited with a semilegendary life and an enormous body of work, the contours of which are poorly defined yet whose authority, to judge from Moliere, was comparable only to that of the gospel: no one challenged the word of Hip pocrates any more than the word of God. “Since Hippocrates says so, it must be done ” concedes Geronte, bowing, and putting his hat back upon his head. Various biographies, more or less late, including a purely Active cycle of Byzantine accounts of the life of Hippocrates, had the effect of blurring the image of the physician, making him into an ideal and mythic figure not altogether unlike Homer. Just as one finds the stone said to mark the place where Horner taught on the island of Chios, at Dascalopetra, so on Cos one looks with wonder upon the “tree of Hippocrates.” And just as the Homeric poems were long taken to mark the absolute beginning of poetry, so, too, the Hippocratic writings were long regarded as the cornerstone of medicine. The study of these texts, known directly or indirectly through commentaries, guided medical theory and practice through the middle of the nineteenth century—to say nothing of the famous Hippocratic oath, which still today is taken by students in many schools of medicine throughout the Western world upon completion of their studies. One might suppose that an excess of credulous respect should have been succeeded by deep skepticism, attaching as much to the person of Hippocra tes as to the extensive body of work that antiquity has bequeathed to us under his name. One might further suppose that from the moment when scientific advances in the nineteenth century led medicine to follow paths different xii Preface than those indicated by the physician of Cos, Hippocrates, having once been praised to the skies, should have survived only as a half-forgotten figure, a mere footnote of medical history. But not at all! Owing to the volume of this work, and the various readings of it that have been proposed over the course of twenty-five centuries, Hippocrates emerges once more as a vital figure in the history of science, having profited from the renewed interest in this discipline in our own century. Thanks to the combined efforts of philologists, historians, philosophers, and other specialists in antiquity, he is now at last coming to find his true place in the history of classical Greece. The life and works of Hippocrates provide invaluable evidence about the life, literature, and thought of the Age of Pericles. This evidence is, in certain respects, no less fascinating than that supplied by Thucydides, Euripides, and Plato— Hippocrates’ most eminent contemporaries in the fields of history, drama, and philosophy—all three of whom drew upon his work, each transposing and adapting what he borrowed to suit his own purposes. The some sixty treatises that have come down to us under the name of Hippocrates surely could not all have been written by the great physician himself, nor even by his disciples of the school of Cos; some of these treatises plainly come from other sources, or are to be dated to later periods. But the main part of this work is prior to that of Aristotle, and it forms, despite certain undeniable discrepancies, an ancient and globally coherent core that can be seen as constituting a distinctly Hippocratic style of thought. Even if we must renounce the impossible dream of definitively identifying the authors of so rich and varied a body of work, we may therefore legitimately refer to them as Hippocratic physicians, in the broad sense of the term. What is more, even if some measure of doubt inevitably remains, the personality of Hippocrates himself no longer remains blurred as it once was. As philological analysis and epigraphical investigations continue to provide fresh insight into the life and works of Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine now gradually begins to free himself from the limbo of hagiography and to reenter the living world of human history. Key Places where Hippocratic physicians practiced are in bold Odessa Thynos % nrrtKTM t THRACE Selymbria Byzanuu”1 PEONIA Perinthusy^ 4 halccdon Datos a PROPONTIS ^ MACEDONI„A M V /V*v^Abdera Aenus Cardia^^ QF AM ju/^ f&) # Pella /^Thasoi CHALCIDICEi ^ o MethoneY^ Stagira C^p»^r^y«cu* HELLESPONT Meliboea Heraclea\ Troy (Ilium) ) EPIRUS ^Tricca q eyrt°SMeUboea \ Larissa Crannon" A<\burtt Ptlfan t Pharsalus • rPHerae. a* Lesb^o^s^MytUene THESSALY MALIS Cv /lEGEAY s Sardis DORIS pHc£S^%6£ 'jOeniadae Crisa ^ ^ 'CUzomenae Colophon Ephesus SunOS'T, IONIA Miletus Epidaunis* V?* Aef*nJ Ki " ft V^C*. . L^J,a“?. „,. \ r HaUcS^Ji"0*'"""" VV.. KV *-~DUe.lloot, »* \\ yJTti CCAARRJIAA \ f\ GerT \ • .Jr ^ ^ } f \ ( **<£> * •<*.. • > ? < H ^ •• rfyiuAi,, J Apollonia PH) km Greece in the Time of Hippocrates
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