Hippocrates

534 Pages·2001·30.58 MB·English

by  Jacques Jouanna

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