Places in man

astrological and magical medicine. The account of the rise of the Arabic medical tradition also devotes attention to the eme;gence of Syriac as a language of scientific discourse, and later the diffusion of the tradition into Byzantium and India is discussed. The illustrations are of course of special importance. These are all exceptionally well-presented, and include not only miniatures, diagrams, and sketches from manuscripts, but also medical instruments, weights, seals, balances, and views of monuments, markets, apothecaries' shops, and traditional medicine still in practice in the Islamic world. A problem that such a work can hardly avoid is the fact that the desire to include the most significant artefacts and draw attention to the most important highlights of medieval Islamic medicine tends to give the impression that this is representative of the face of medicine with which most people were familiar. It is well, then, to recall that the material in this book was typical of a highly urbanized medical culture to which the vast majority-peasants in the agrarian countryside-probably had little access. And this observation in itself begs the question of how effective medicine could have been in a tradition that in both its Greek and Arabic dispensations arbitrarily classified both illnesses and therapeutic strategies under rubrics that clearly had little to do with the true nature of the problem and the measures required to combat it. The sophisticated medical compendia of leading figures like al-MajOsT and Ibn STna were certainly important in their medieval context, but in many cases could not have helped a doctor's patients; the medieval hospital was a major step in the institutionalization of medical structures, but could never have played more than a minor role in the delivery of medical care. But such are the perennial difficulties of presenting pre-modern medicine to a public rather than specialized audience. The institutions and individuals whose labours are represented in this work are to be congratulated for bringing to fruition a truly monumental contribution to the field. Hippocrates, Places in man, edited and translated with introduction and commentary One of the earliest texts of the Hippocratic Corpus, and one of the most intriguing is Places in man, ir£pi TO6nov Tdv corr&t avOpemov, de locis in homine (Loc.), which, in its description of the body a capite ad calcem and adumbration of empirical (animal) dissection, serves, one might say, almost as a model for more sophisticated treatises. According …