Hippocratic lives and legends

ascribed to Soranus and others. He repeatedly states reservations about how far these can be believed, but just as often rescues himself from serious doubt by appealing to an argument from plausibility. So far as the Corpus itself goes, it is not that we have Hippocrates at its centre, but rather, in the more frequent softer formulation, the work of Hippocrates and his circle-though again Jouanna allows himself, for convenience, to speak of Hippocrates himself often enough. The problems with this whole methodology have often been rehearsed. The key argument rests on the assumption that a core of "genuine works" can be identified, to which others can then be added thanks to their "close relationship" to that core. But what this leaves out of account is the divergences, on theories and on practice, both between the core and the periphery, and within the core. Jouanna recognizes the spirit of competitiveness among doctors in the fifth and fourth centuries, but generally limits that implicitly to the external relations between-his chosen texts and rival traditions. He does not pay due attention to, indeed he does not recognize, the implications of the fundamental disagreements within the core treatises, on points of method, on the conception of the medical art, on the proper procedures of diagnosis and therapy. The general public is, I fear, likely to be misled by the positive, and positivist, reconstruction of Hippocrates here offered, even though the book sets out a considerable body of the evidence relevant to the analysis of classical Greek medicine. Hard on the heels of Wesley Smith's edition of the pseudo-Hippocratic Letters and Speeches comes his pupil's study of their transformation into lives and legends. Dr Pinault provides a translation of the three main Greek biographies, by Soranus [2nd century], the Suda [10th century], and Tzetzes [ca. 1150], and of an anonymous [12th-century] life in Latin (obviously translated from a Greek original). The texts themselves are given in an appendix. In the second half of the book, she discusses the Arabic biographies by as-Sijistani (923-983) and by al-Mubassir a century later. She focuses in particular on three stories, Hippocrates and the plague of Athens, Hippocrates' cure of the love-sick Perdiccas, and Hippocrates' patriotic and principled refusal to serve King Artaxerxes of Persia. The versions of these tales are examined in a variety of authors, from the second century BC onwards, and their interrelationships and apparent interdependencies …