The name of Hippocrates continues to hold power; an internet search for ‘Hippocrates quotes’ reveals a number of aphorisms and passages attributed to the Father of Medicine, imparting his ‘wisdom’ for today. Not necessarily even from the Hippocratic corpus, these draw on Hippocrates as the voice of reason, a sympathetic observer, a careful recorder or a patriot, character traits that themselves come out of those treatises which different historical periods have chosen to include in the Hippocratic corpus.

The study of ancient medicine has developed in many ways since 1972, when the first of the triennial Hippocratic Colloquia was held. It has largely moved on from the ‘Hippocratic question’: whether any of the treatises were written by the historical Hippocrates. Key areas of progress include editing Hippocratic and Galenic treatises now lost in their original ancient Greek but surviving in other languages and moving beyond a narrow focus on the works attributed to these men. The 2002 International Hippocrates Colloquium, ‘Hippocrates in Context’, included a thread on authors not included in the corpus while, in the present volume, A.E. Hanson (pp. 48–60) explores the many papyrus fragments which mention medicine, but which have languished in the ‘unidentified’ pile while experts have concentrated on literary pieces. In this new world, does the label ‘Hippocratic’ still have any value? As E. Nelson points out here in an engaging and important chapter (pp. 117–40), nobody whose work is in the Hippocratic corpus used the ‘H’ word; ‘Hippocrates, after all, might have been no more aware that he was Hippocratic than Jesus might have been aware that he was “Christian”’ (p. 117).

With the categories of both ‘Hippocratic medicine’ and ‘Hippocratic corpus’ coming under scrutiny, the 2008 International Hippocrates Colloquium was particularly opportune. The proceedings of some of these Colloquia can take many years to appear (the Leiden event in 2005 took five years) and, considering the importance of this particular volume, the even longer delay is regrettable, meaning that a few of the 20 chapters have been superseded by the authors’ publications since the conference was held. However, while some Colloquia volumes have had quite a general topic, on which contributors focused with greater or lesser success, the editors of this volume should be congratulated on their work to ensure that there is a real exploration of the central questions in these 20 chapters and the strong introduction by D.-J.

While the main theme of the Colloquium was what the 60–70 treatises of the Hippocratic corpus have in common, this involved exploring why and how they were brought together. Part 1, therefore, covers the formation of the corpus. P. van der Eijk notes (p. 34) that much of the evidence for writers whose work was not included in the Corpus was already discussed in 1840 and 1856 by the French M.S. Houdart, now a forgotten name; it was Emile Littré who wanted to trace the medical science to Hippocrates alone. W. Smith (The Hippocratic Tradition [1979: revised electronic edition 2002, http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/ressources/pdf/medicina-hippo2.pdf]), imagined the librarians at Alexandria classifying anything medical and in Ionic dialect as ‘Hippocratic’. Several writers here are less sceptical, accepting with some qualifications J. Jouanna's view of ‘an ancient and globally coherent core that can be seen as constituting a distinctly Hippocratic style of thought’ (Jouanna, Hippocrates [1999], p. xii); a Coan core, to which the Cnidian treatises were then added, with various others coming in after the first century c.e. Significant here is van der Eijk's masterly chapter (pp. 15–47), a further development of his 2004 lecture ‘Is there such a thing as Hippocratic medicine?’. Were the treatises always anonymous or anonymised later? Van der Eijk comes down in favour of the latter option. Are those included linked because of their dialect, because commentaries were written on them from an early date (Hanson) or because they conform to Plato's view of the medical art and of Hippocrates as the model for physicians (P. Demont, pp. 61–82)? P. Pérez Cañizares (pp. 83–98) focuses on treatises that we consider ‘Hippocratic’ but are not mentioned by Erotian and/or Galen; how do these relate to the idea of a ‘core’? Overall, D.-J. memorably notes that the Corpus grew ‘more like an octopus than a snowball’ (p. 14) while Pérez Cañizares characterises its contents as ‘haphazard and probably based more on chance than on any sort of intended quality control’ (p. 93). In similar vein, van der Eijk argues for dismembering the Hippocratic body (p. 43); that is, contextualising and understanding the individual texts with a view to regrouping them.

Part 2 looks at Hippocratic concepts. Is ‘Hippocratic’ just a convenient shorthand or is there something these writings have in common, something that only comes out when they are read as a group: their view on what is ‘natural’, their approach to knowledge or their belief in what medicine can do? For R. (pp. 242–57), what is ‘Hippocratic’ is a mixture of optimism and pessimism about the human condition.

The usual suspects are all here; On Ancient Medicine, Regimen, On the Nature of Man and Anonymus Londiniensis feature extensively. But some of the texts which take centre stage are less obvious. For Pérez Cañizares, that means Affections, and for E. Craik (pp. 195–208) Glands, here rehabilitated as ‘a significant work of the early 4th c.’ (p. 196). For Nelson, it means the Pseudepigrapha, which cover the period in which the corpus was constituted, developed and reached its final form, and especially Decree. He argues that two different versions of Hippocrates exist in the Pseudepigrapha: the member of a healing clan and the individual hero. Once the corpus contains both versions, Decree takes on the role of merging the traditions and inching them closer to the individual hero. In J. Mann's analysis (pp. 141–62), On the Art emerges as the treatise that ‘may have given us the most generically “Hippocratic” picture of medicine’ (p. 161), precisely because it does not go into theories but looks at what those who practise medicine have in common.

In the shortest section, Part 3: ‘Hippocratic Topics in Cultural Contexts’, some attempts are made to approach the key questions by focusing on what the Corpus omits. L. McNamara (pp. 308–27) identifies love-sickness, arguing that this is a deliberate choice, distancing the concerns of the writers of the Corpus from the concerns of folk medicine and magic. L. Totelin (pp. 292–307) identifies non-gynaecological remedies, and usefully compares the absence of remedies for eye diseases in particular with the recipes included in Aristophanes.

Part 4 focuses on Galen as reader of the Corpus. A. Roselli (pp. 329–44) characterises Galen's Hippocrates as ‘lover of truth’, a view also found in Apollonius of Citium, and uses this as a way of studying the terminology of deception in the Corpus. V. Boudon-Millot (pp. 378–98) examines Galen's own use of ἱπποκράτειος – what, and who, does he label in this way? When he uses the word of a person, it is usually to criticise ‘Hippocrateans’ for failing to understand the text or the doctrine of Hippocrates. Most important to Galen as ‘Hippocratic’ are the innate/acquired heat and the four elements, humours and qualities. She ends with the question ‘dans quelle mesure Galien croyait-il lui-même à l'Hippocrate qu'il avait ainsi forgé?’ (p. 397). T. Curtis's chapter (pp. 399–420) (developed from his 2009 Ph.D.) follows on logically from this, exploring Galen's views on what Hippocrates thought about the four elements and humours in particular. The final chapter, by R.J. Hankinson (pp. 421–43), also examines the elements, showing that ‘in fact Galen and “Hippocrates” have rather different views about both the nature and identity of the elements, even as Galen seeks to elide that fact’ (p. 432). This section as a whole is useful for thinking about how Galenic commentaries work, recalling Hanson's argument that commentary was a way of ‘lay[ing] claim to the treatise, to colonize and possess it’ (p. 51). Hankinson concludes that ‘[Galen's] Hippocrates is, in a sense, a construction. But he is, I believe, a legitimate interpretative construction’ (p. 441).

The book includes an adequate subject index and an index locorum; it is very well produced, with a few points missed in proof-reading, including ‘Susan Saïd’ (pp. 121–2); ‘Anonymous Londoniensis’ (p. 124); Erotion (p. 129).