This volume contains English translations of sixteen papers by J. published between 1980 and 2008, often in ‘rather specialised volumes’, as the editor writes, with a sense of understatement.
J.'s Hippocrates (English translation by M.B. DeBevoise, 1999) is well known. He has edited, with much innovative philological skill and detailed commentaries, numerous Hippocratic treatises: Nature of Man (1975, 20022), Diseases II (1983), Breaths, The Art (1988), Ancient Medicine (1990) (the Greek text of which formed the basis for M. Shiefsky's translation and commentary, 2005), Airs Waters Places (1996), Epidemics V and VII (with the late M.D. Grmek, 2000), and Sacred Disease (2003); and he is now working on Pronostic. To this impressive list he recently added the newly rediscovered Galenic treatise Avoiding Distress (with V. Boudon-Millot and A. Pietrobelli, 2010). He also founded, with L. Bourgey, the Colloques internationaux hippocratiques (the fourteenth was held in Paris last year) and, with A. Garzya, the series of Ecdotique des textes médicaux grecs. A comprehensive list of his publications on ancient medicine is available in V. Boudon, A. Guardasole and C. Magdelaine (edd.), La science médicale antique. Nouveaux regards (2007), pp. 1–18. This selection, by van der Eijk (in consultation with J.), is divided into three ‘strands’: historical, literary and cultural context of Greek medicine; relationship to philosophy; and reception of Hippocratic medicine. Some papers, especially in the first two parts, may seem to duplicate chapters of his Hippocrates, but they were intended for a more scholarly public, and their translation is no doubt useful. Others, written after Hippocrates, add significant novelties, particularly (but not only) about post-Hippocratic medicine.
‘Egyptian Medicine and Greek Medicine’ stresses the ‘hypothetical nature’ (p. 7) of some suggested ‘influences’, and studies the evolution from the ‘prestige’ of Egyptian medicine to a ‘modest role’ (p. 17) in the Greek history of medicine. A further, also hypothetical, context would be Mesopotamian medicine, often neglected by Hippocratic scholars (see the recent volume Advances in Mesopotamian Medicine from Hammurabi to Hippocrates, ed. A. Attia, G. Buisson, M.J. Geller [2009]).
‘Politics and Medicine. The Problem of Change in Regimen in Acute Diseases and Thucydides (Book 6)’ analyses the ‘agreement’ between the Hippocratic text and Thucydides concerning two conceptions of therapy, and the subtle Thucydidean use of the medical metaphor, ‘as a precusor to both Plato and Aristotle’, about the comparison between leader and doctor (two other papers by J., not in this volume, study this comparison in Plato and Aristotle: Ktema 4 [1979], 121–31 and 5 [1980], 257–66).
‘Rhetoric and Medicine in the Hippocratic Corpus. A Contribution to the History of Rhetoric in the Fifth Century’ was written when J. was editing Breaths and The Art (his introductions to these two texts, and to Ancient Medicine, in the Budé series should also be read by anyone concerned with the history of rhetoric).
‘Hippocratic Medicine and Greek Tragedy’ mainly compares uses of miasma and descriptions of madness, with notes on the vocabulary (see below).
‘Disease as Aggression in the Hippocratic Corpus and Greek Tragedy: Wild and Devouring Disease’ shows that the vocabulary of pathology ‘preserves … traces of an older representation of disease … as an aggressive force that attacks from the outside … like a wild animal’.
‘Hippocrates and the Sacred’ not only discusses the ‘rationalism’ of Hippocratic doctors, ‘never in conflict with the religion of the great sanctuaries’, but studies the links, attested by an inscription from Delphi, between Hippocrates of Cos and the genos of the Asclepiades from Cos. It is a longer version (originally in Italian) of a similar analysis in his Hippocrates.
‘Air, Miasma and Contagion in the Time of Hippocrates and the Survival of Miasma in Post-Hippocratic Medicine (Rufus of Ephesus, Galen and Palladius)’ again briefly discusses uses of miasma, and adds a translation with commentary of Galen's On Differences between Fevers on this theme (see especially his long footnote 22 on the ‘seeds of disease’).
In ‘Dietetics in Hippocratic Medicine: Definition, Main Problems, Discussion’, we notice J.'s interpretation of Herodotus 1.133 (pp. 141–2).
‘Water, Health and Disease in the Hippocratic Treatise Airs, Waters and Places’ and ‘Wine and Medicine in Ancient Greece’ are ground-breaking papers on the originality of Airs, Waters and Places concerning different kinds of waters, and as a first, and successful, attempt to offer a general view of wine in medicine (even for women).
‘The Theory of Sensation, Thought and the Soul in the Hippocratic Treatise Regimen: its Connections with Empedocles and Plato's Timaeus’ – a difficult paper about a difficult subject, in which Greek texts or words are often given without translation – is especially useful for its interpretation of the periodos (i.e. of the soul) in Chapter 35 of Regimen, for its analysis (and its discussion with R. Joly's commentary in the CMG) of a ‘conception of aisthêsis’ as ‘sensory particles’, perhaps coming from Empedocles, and for the well-founded hypothesis of a direct echo of Regimen in Timaeus.
Two papers, ‘At the Roots of Melancholy: is Greek Medicine Melancholic?’ and ‘The Legacy of the Hippocratic Treatise The Nature of Man: the Theory of the Four Humours’, are linked to recent discoveries by J. of texts on humours hitherto unedited. J. asserts that ‘the illness called melancholy pre-dates Hippocratic medicine’, and should be separated from a humour called ‘black bile’ and from the melancholic ‘temperament’, ‘rarely attested’ (p. 236), that ‘Aristotelian melancholy is fundamentally not Hippocratic’ (p. 241), and that ‘the terminus ante quem for the appearance of the theory of the four temperaments’ is not earlier than the sixth century a.d. (p. 249). The history of this theory in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages is very much improved by the new texts, some of which are presented here.
Three papers on Galen reflect another shift in J.'s work on medicine, a growing interest in Galen. Not only does he study ‘Galen's Reading of the Hippocratic Treatise The Nature of Man’, i.e. ‘The Foundations of Hippocratism in Galen’ (pp. 313–34), but, more generally, ‘Galen's Reading of Hippocratic Ethics’ (pp. 261–86) – with many useful quotations (but nearly no reference to philosophy), and ‘Galen's Concept of Nature’ (pp. 287–312) – with Aristotle (too briefly quoted) set ‘in the background to favour Hippocrates, a mythical archegete [sic], who is reconstructed by Galen’ (p. 310).
As a native French speaker, the present reviewer is not in a position to evaluate fully the English translation, which seems accurate with few typos. This volume might have collected other important papers by J., in particular ‘L'archéologie de l'Ecole de Cnide et le nouveau témoignage du P.Köln 356 (Inv. 6067)’ and the ‘Postface’ to the second edition of his book on the so-called ‘Cnidian’ medicine and the so-called ‘Cnidian’ treatises, the title of which is Hippocrate: Pour une archéologie de l'Ecole de Cnide (2009 [1974], not to be confused with his Hippocrates published in French in 1992, and in English in 1999). These two papers reassert, with some new arguments, one of J.'s major, and controversial, theses on the Hippocratic Corpus, the distinction of a school of ‘Cnidian treatises’, and the possibility of reconstructing a history of these treatises, from older to later pieces (the last ones acknowledging e.g. phlegma as a cold humour and black bile as a separate form of bile).
