Theories of Fever from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

IN THE Western medical tradition, fever and fevers loom large. Yet medical historians have, on the whole, fought shy of such a diffuse and difficult subject, preferring the investigation of more speculative and general theories of medicine to a careful examination of what, to judge from the surviving literature, was the most common disease or group of diseases that a doctor encountered in his practice. The few who have been bold enough to suggest modern clinical equivalents for earlier fevers, like W. H. S. Jones in his classic book on Malaria and Greek history, have been accused of historical and epidemiological naYivete, for certain diseases can change their character in the course of time, and the literary information is rarely sufficiently detailed to point unequivocally to a single diagnosis. The essays in this collection, which were in part delivered as papers at a meeting in the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in June 1980, are put forward both as an incitement to a further study of a vast topic and as an attempt to bring some of the approaches of a modern medical historian to bear on a few aspects of a tradition that stretched for over two millennia, from Hippocrates to the nineteenth century. Inevitably perhaps, the authors have concentrated upon fever theory rather than upon the more hazardous task of clinical identification, for it is a truism that one's appreciation of what one sees depends in part on the intellectual framework in which it is seen. But they are all aware that medical history is more than the mere history of ideas: it has an inevitable practical and social dimension. What the doctor treated was not simply an intellectual construct. The study of fever and fevers in their context thus involves a variety of complementary techniques and sources, and the authors and the editors are alike conscious of the gaps in their own scholarly armour. Yet they believe that this collection, taken as a whole, will provide some general guidelines towards the understanding of this complex subject and, at the same time, reveal some of the problems involved in investigating a single medical topic in a number of different societies. Professor Wesley D. Smith's paper, while chronologically distinct from the rest, nevertheless considers texts which formed the empirical basis of the whole tradition, the Hippocratic Corpus. He argues that the case-notes in Epidemics 5 and 7, …