It is no secret that there is a substantial lag between current scholarship about the ancient Mediterranean and the popular reception of that scholarship, but in few areas is this gap more pronounced than in that of the Hippocratic corpus. The misinformation problems are so ubiquitous that those who teach courses in ancient medicine frequently resort to syllabus statements warning their students against relying on any resources not provided by the instructor. But this problem is not only one plaguing undergraduates; professionals who have not had training in medical sources also can be misled into perpetuating inaccurate narratives about all things Hippocratic. That is understandable; the Hippocratic corpus is still considered a niche text not included in mainstream reading lists for undergraduate or graduate programmes in Classics and Ancient History. Even specialists have moments of consternation when facing apocryphal Hippocrates stories confidently told on the internet, wondering if perhaps they have missed a vital document in their work.
K.'s volume comes as a welcome and sorely needed antidote to the confusion generated by the reception of Hippocrates and the Hippocratic corpus in popular culture. K. is uniquely well positioned to do justice to this daunting topic, with strong credentials as a scholar of the Hippocratic corpus and with an active online presence. This dual literacy in both the digital world and the scholarship of fourth-century medicine is marshalled with accessible aplomb by K. against the moving target posed by Internet Hippocrates. One need not have extensive background in the history of ancient Mediterranean medicine to follow her arguments or the text's structure, which will prove a welcome boon to the target audience.
It is worth noting that the publisher Bloomsbury has offered the text with open access courtesy of Knowledge Unlatched, thus making it available to the online audience most in need of the contents and creating an accessible option for screen-reading technology. This laudable choice increases the availability of high-quality professional research to the public, thus actively addressing the very issues K.'s book highlights. The text accessed via one's browser includes page references from the print edition and hyperlinked footnotes. Countering inaccurate Hippocratic information has never been easier.
The introduction introduces the thorny issue of the Hippocratic Problem – the thin evidence for a historical Hippocrates and the historiographic tradition, beginning in antiquity, that created the Hippocratic stories we learn through popular culture and non-specialist resources. K. begins where readers who grow up in the English-speaking do, with the received notions of who Hippocrates was and why he matters. Then Chapter 1, cheekily, proceeds to tell us in two sentences what we know about Hippocrates – virtually nothing. This demonstrates the Hippocratic problem in a nutshell: onto a nearly blank slate, a tradition was born.
The second chapter takes up the task of explaining how this disconnect between historical Hippocrates and the apocryphal ‘Hippocrates’ of tradition began. K. proceeds to the connection between ‘Hippocrates’ and the Hippocratic Corpus, that many-tentacled, incompletely canonised body of an indeterminate number of treatises referred to in antiquity as the work of ‘Hippocrates’. All is tied together at the conclusion with a discussion of how the symbiotic relationship between the Hippocratic corpus and the mythical ‘Hippocrates’ created a biographical tradition, and why that tradition has proved more compelling to modern popular audiences than the messy reality of a poorly documented fifth-century physician and an even messier collection of ‘his’ works. A discussion such as this can easily dip into the territory of scholarly diatribe. K., however, remains an empathetic guide leveraging her pop-cultural literacy to good effect. These first chapters will be assigned reading in my ancient medicine course; they do everything I could ask for to introduce students to the Hippocratic corpus.
Once this trust has been established and the landscape of sources and traditions mapped out, K.'s third chapter wades into the fray of popular disinformation, especially a notoriously troublesome Wikipedia article on Hippocrates of Cos. K. calls Wikipedia a ‘moving target’, as any scholar who has tried to emend it during a cranky evening would agree. Her discussion of the inner workings of Wikipedia editing is valuable in its own right for anyone who wants to educate their students about how one evaluates the quality of resources in general and online sources in particular. Several tired tropes of Hippocratic biography are duly put to rest, beginning with the commonly and perplexingly invoked ‘Father of medicine’ title and proceeding to entirely fictional details of Hippocratic biography and works. The exercise effectively demonstrates the perils of a ‘print is good, online is bad’ approach to source evaluation, and it also shows how contextualising misinformation in the contemporary debates of an era can aid in spotting fabrications.
Chapter 4 addresses the most famous ancient text that everyone (mis)quotes and few seem to have read: the Hippocratic Oath. This short text serves as a case study for the relationship between the Corpus and its mythologised author, then introduces a discussion of the related problem of Imhotep, another figure who has wandered into a mythological afterlife similar to Hippocrates’. There follows a series of case examples of how decontextualised (or uncited or fictional) passages from the corpus manifest in modern culture from news released about coprolite analysis to hysteria to detox diets, showcasing the range of misunderstandings perpetuated by popular history entertainment media.
Chapters 5 and 6 delve further into the ecosystem of alleged Hippocrates (and Imhotep) quotes, emphasising their real power to sell products and undermine evidence-based medicine while perpetuating ableist rhetoric about lifestyle causing all chronic illness. As with Chapter 3, Chapter 5 offers general media literacy courses an accessible and useful guide to the history and abuse of quotes and quoting. Readers will find frequent offenders like ‘First, do no harm’ and ‘Let food be thy medicine’ addressed, explained and contextualised.
Chapter 7 directly grapples with the weaponisation of ‘Hippocrates’ in the battle between advocates of alternative medical practices and mainstream medicine. In the environment of the Coronavirus pandemic this chapter has prescient relevance to the crisis the world currently finds itself enduring. Beyond this, though, themes of failures in modern medicine to listen to and care for the chronically ill and those affected by racial and economic discrimination also come to the fore. As K.'s conclusion argues, questioning and addressing Hippocratic myth is not simply an exercise in correcting people who are wrong on the internet; understanding how and why Hippocratic myth is created tells us important things about the medical landscape of our modern world. The Hippocrates we construct for the moment is not unimportant, but rather an imperfect cry for help.
A structural note for those wishing to assign portions of this book to their classes: the chapters build sequentially. As a result, they do not excerpt well. This is an observation and not a critique. With such complicated issues as these, chapters able to stand alone would be tediously repetitive.
My parents were doctors. From them, I inherited a bust of ‘Hippocrates’, a portrait K. discusses in the introduction. I first heard about the Hippocratic ‘Oath’ when I was a young child encouraged to consider attending medical school. My students come to me with similar stories and more now that podcasts about medical history peppered with ‘Hippocrates wrote …’ spark their interest in the field and send them to my class. Hippocrates Now comes as a gift to all of us who are on the front lines of history instruction in 2022, and it represents the best of what classical reception work has to offer contemporary conversations.
