The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates, US Edition

Longlisted for the RUNCIMAN AWARD, 2021 Medicine is one of the great fields of achievement of the Ancient Greeks. Hippocrates is celebrated worldwide as the father of medicine and the Hippocratic Oath is admired throughout the medical profession as a founding statement of ethics and ideals. In the fifth century BC, Greeks even wrote of medicine as a newly discovered craft they had invented. Robin Lane Fox's remarkable book puts their invention of medicine in a wider context, from the epic poems of Homer to the first doctors known to have been active in the Greek world. He examines what we do and do not know about Hippocrates and his Oath and the many writings that survive under his name. He then focuses on seven core texts which give the case histories of named individuals, showing that books 1 and 3 belong far earlier than previously recognised. Their re-dating has important consequences for the medical awareness of the great Greek dramatists and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Robin Lane Fox pieces together the doctor's thinking from his terse observations and relates it in a new way to the history of Greek prose and ideas. This original and compelling book opens windows onto many other aspects of the classical world, from women's medicine to street-life, empire, art, sport, sex and even botany. It fills a dark decade in a new way and carries readers along an extraordinary journey form Homer's epics to the grateful heirs of the Greek case histories, first in the Islamic world and then in early modern Europe. "Medical thinking and observation were radically changed by the ancient Greeks, one of their great legacies to the world. In the fifth century BCE, a Greek doctor put forward his clinical observations of individual men, women, and children in a collection of case histories known as the Epidemics. Among his working principles was the famous maxim "Do no harm." In The Invention of Medicine, acclaimed historian Robin Lane Fox puts these remarkable works in a wider context and upends our understanding of medical history by establishing that they were written much earlier than previously thought. Lane Fox endorses the ancient Greeks' view that their texts' author, not named, was none other than the father of medicine, the great Hippocrates himself. Lane Fox's argument changes our sense of the development of scientific and rational thinking in Western culture, and he explores the consequences for Greek artists, dramatists and the first writers of history. Hippocrates emerges as a key figure in the crucial change from an archaic to a classical world."--Amazon. List of Illustrations List of Maps Preface Introduction PART ONE Heroes to Hippocrates 1 Homeric Healing 2 Poetic Sickness 3 Travelling Doctors 4 From Italy to Susa 5 The Asclepiads 6 Hippocrates, Fact and Fiction 7 The Hippocratic Corpus 8 The Invention of Medicine PART TWO The Doctor’s Island 9 The Epidemic Books 10 ‘On Thasos, during autumn ...’ 11 The Thasian Context 12 Building Blocks of History 13 Art, Sport and Office-Holding 14 Sex and Street Life 15 Patients of Quality PART THREE The Doctor’s Mind 16 By the Bedside 17 Filtered Reality 18 Retrospective Diagnosis 19 Philosophers and Dramatists 20 Epidemics and History 21 Hippocratic Impact 22 From Thasos to Tehran Endnote 1 Endnote 2 Endnote 3 Notes Bibliography Index