Index Hippocraticus, Fasc. I, A-Δ

It has footnotes and a bibliography but a historiographical chapter would have been invaluable for teacher and student alike. More particularly, Berliner does not situate his work in relation to E. Richard Brown's Rockefeller medicine men, which appeared in 1979. This provocative work Berliner acknowledges, saying: "Despite the clearly dominant role that Rockefeller played in the transition from a sectarian to a scientific medical education system, it is surprising that only. . [Brown]. . has specifically told this story" (p 4). There are a couple of points about this: first, Brown did not tell a "story" but gave an interpretation; second, Berliner's book in structure and argument seems, to me, to be very close to Brown's. Berliner has worked and published on this material for many years, and there seems a curious failure on his part to advance the debate. Although Berliner deals at length with some things, such as the Chicago episode, which are only outlined by Brown, he never suggests where he differs from him or agrees with him, where he would change the emphasis and so forth. A Marxist not engaging in dialectics is a very strange business indeed. (paperback). After over thirty years of preparation by members of the staff of the Hamburg Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the first volume of the Index to Hippocrates has finally appeared. The tardiness ofpublication has not been without substantial benefit, for, as the introduction reveals, a growing consciousness of the deficiencies ofearlier Hippocratic scholarship led to the complete rethinking and reworking of the original plan. What is modestly labelled an Index is now major work of learning in its own right, far removed from a computerized concordance. The preparation of this first volume involved little more than a total revision of the manuscripts of the Hippocratic Corpus, a list of the most significant being in the Introduction, and a re-edition of the whole text. The deficiencies of Littre's editing are made clear, and the superiority of more scientific editors amply demonstrated. Secondly, each entry includes a translation of the term into Latin, as well as a lexicographical breakdown of the various uses of the word. Most important of all, each entry also includes not only major variants in the text of the passage cited, but also emendations and conjectures. From this it is possible to determine the value of the citation far more accurately than from a straightforward reference, and …