Scholastic medicine and philosophy

chosen to claim it for their own, and the meaning of many of its phrases has long been the subject of doubt and discussion. This beautifully produced edition will go far towards informing the German reader of the difficulties of interpreting the Oath, and will alert him to some of the dangers of an eager identification of ancient and modern. He will also gain from some of the commentators' subtle insights an appreciation of just how much new information can be gained by the application of scholarly reasoning to even the best-known of texts. Yet he should also be warned of some of the interpretations put forward here. The author's passionate involvement with Hippocratic studies and his desire to restore the ethical basis of modern medicine by a return to the proven values of old do not always make for a sober judgement of probabilities. The sections on the religious beliefs of the Dorian communities are filled with exaggerations and circular argument, while not everyone will be convinced of the parallels supposed between the playwright Menander, fl. 300 BC, and the Oath. Even if one is prepared to date the Oath to c. 400 BC-which is likely but on present evidence totally beyond proof-, then it is still necessary to explain away the evidence of Plato before the Oath can be accepted as the creation of Hippocrates the Asclepiad of Cos. The Oath represents a transition from a group of medical practitioners who kept their knowledge closed within the family to a looser situation in which those who wished to learn were taken in, almost adopted, into the family, which, in return, they were to consider as their own. Medical learning is thus still kept secret, available only to the family. Yet Plato, in one of the only contemporary references to Hippocrates, declares that he was a famous teacher of medicine for money. Lichtenthaeler rightly rejects the old attempt to reconcile the evidence of Plato with tradition by setting the Oath early in Hippocrates' career (and by implication allowing him to violate it in his old age), but his own suggestion, that all the many students of Hippocrates were all adopted into the Asclepiad family and all in turn continued to administer the Oath to their descendants and pupils, is equally unlikely. Plato's description of Hippocrates is as a medical sophist, dispensing his learning for cash for the benefit of …