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Hippocrates Now: the 'Father of Medicine' King, Helen. "What We Thought We Knew." Hippocrates Now: The ‘Father of Medicine’ in the Internet Age. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 19–42. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350005921.ch-002>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 17:22 UTC. Copyright © Helen King 2020. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 2 What We Th o u g h t W e K n e w I was tempted to start this book with a blank sheet because it would represent, more vividly than words could ever do, our lack of knowledge about the historical fi gure behind this book, and of the sort of medicine he advocated.1 Yet we still need to talk about Hippocrates. His name holds power; any internet search for ‘Hippocrates quotes’ will reveal many aphorisms and passages being attributed to the Father of Medicine, imparting his ‘wisdom’ for today while using him to support a range of medical practices. Not necessarily even deriving from what we call the ‘Hippocratic Corpus’ – the collection of ancient Greek treatises traditionally associated with his name – these phrases and sentences draw on an image of Hippocrates as ‘a good practical physician’, the voice of reason, a sympathetic observer, a careful recorder of experience, courageous and honest, and a patriot; character traits which themselves come out of those treatises which diff erent historical periods have chosen to include in the Hippocratic Corpus. 2 In the 1950s, he was even seen as morally at ‘the level of the greatest Christian’, a view shared by Herbert Ratner, for whom ‘Hippocrates comes closer to God in his vision of medicine’ than did contemporary medical education. 3 To quote from a popular history of medicine, ‘ “In truth we know little or nothing of Hippocrates,” says one historian, preparatory to writing of him at length’: I am aware that the number of pages in this chapter suggests that I have fallen into this trap, as described by the late poet and satirist Richard Armour. 4 But it is important to realize that the invocation of the name of Hippocrates is far from new. A Latin treatise based on sections of the Hippocratic Diseases of Women 2 , preserved in two French manuscripts from the ninth century, raises the value of what follows by adding a prologue that hails him: ‘Herald of truth and master who does not lie, as if made out of the seed of the gods, unique in the 19 20 Hippocrates Now world, Hippocrates illuminated the art of medicine and provided good health to the human race.’ 5 What is perhaps most surprising is the longevity of this inspiring and positive image. Patients today, apparently, even ‘wonder aloud at how nice it might be to have Hippocrates as their doctor’. 6 Why? Perhaps because the other options are so unattractive, as in a 1991 book title, Hitler or Hippocrates? 7 More commonly, however, Hippocrates is contrasted with mainstream medicine in a series of binaries, summarized here by David Newman: Hippocrates was a holistic practitioner intent on treating the complete person, whereas today we tend to specialize in exquisitely narrow fi elds of anatomic and physiologic knowledge, leaving the balance of the human body to our colleagues. Hippocrates was a devoted and objective empiricist, while most modern doctors spend so little time with each patient that it’s absurd to claim serious observational skills. Hippocrates was a consummate communicator, while today’s doctors (ask our patients) are walking communication nightmares. Hippocrates felt and demonstrated sympathy, while we’ve chosen a colder, more ‘scientifi c’ model for doctor-patient interaction . .8 Th is summary already takes us into the central aim of this book: to explore the versions of ‘Hippocrates’ which are dominant at present, considering why so many variations are possible, and discussing what they tell us both about how the internet does history and also about our continued need for a ‘Father of Medicine’. Even that title is controversial, and not just because of other claimants, an aspect to which I shall return in Chapter 3. In language that resembles the wording of those ninth-century gynaecological manuscripts, a letter which forms part of the very earliest Hippocratic tradition describes him as ‘father of health, saviour, soother of pain . leader in the divine science’.9 S o , which is he to be: saviour or scientist, Father of Medicine or Father of Health? Although it is rarely used today, ‘Father of Health’ seems more appropriate for the current association of Hippocrates with holistic medicine, to which I shall return in Chapter 7. Not only the fi rst and the best, Hippocrates is real, and his authority depends on this. 10 Suggestions that perhaps he did not really exist are labelled in religious terms as ‘heresy’ or ‘sacrilege’.11 Since at least the early Roman empire, the underlying message of almost – but not quite – all users of the name of Hippocrates is not just that he was real, and great, but that ‘Hippocrates was so What We Th ought We Knew 21 spot-on’, ‘Smart man he was’, and ‘Hippocrates was right’. 12 Th is last statement has been chosen for titles of articles promoting allegedly Hippocratic aphorisms such as ‘walking is the best medicine’ or ‘all disease begins in the gut’, to which I shall return in Chapters 5 and 6. 13 Why do we so badly want to believe in an omniscient Hippocrates today? Before focusing on ‘Hippocrates now’, however, we need some sense of the basics. In this chapter, I shall consider not only some answers that are now being given, but some which have historically been off ered, to the question of what, if anything, Hippocrates wrote: something we need to think about if we are to decide whether or not he was ‘right’. Most probably, in my view, nothing that survives can be attributed to him but, while my virtually-empty Chapter 1 will be controversial, this is hardly a new stance to adopt: this was also the position taken by Ludwig Edelstein in 1939.14 Th e absence of any words which we can confi dently attribute to Hippocrates himself does seem odd, bearing in mind his fame, and living with this absence can be painful. In 1939, Edelstein warned that ‘Th e longing to read Hippocrates’ own writings, the diffi culty of becoming reconciled to the fact that they are not extant, should at any rate be no reason for setting up the methodological postulate that they must have been preserved.’ 15 Here, Edelstein correctly identifi ed the extra dimension of ‘longing’, also noted by Jaap Mansfeld in a 1980 article in which he described the ‘emotional’ reasons why we would like to attribute certain treatises to Hippocrates himself.16 Th is is never just about the head: in the aft erlife of Hippocrates, the heart too plays its part. Th e translator of the earliest volumes of the Loeb Classical Library edition of the works of the Corpus, W.H.S. Jones, wrote in 1923 that ‘Ignorance and uncertainty seem to be the fi nal result of most of the interesting problems presented by the Hippocratic collection.’ 17 However, none of this closes our questions down, because we still need to know why, over the course of two and a half millennia of Hippocratic reception, some treatises have been considered his own work. I shall outline this here, and also address the further question of who Hippocrates was, or at least what he has represented to those invoking his name to claim his authority for what they say. Some scholars of ancient medicine consider that ‘even if some measure of doubt inevitably remains, the personality of Hippocrates himself no longer remains blurred as it once was’.18 Is that the case? Who was Hippocrates? 22 Hippocrates Now Hippocrates as God and Galen as his prophet?19 Th ere is one person whose contribution to what we thought we knew about Hippocrates deserves special attention: Galen, the great second-century ce physician who claimed to be Hippocrates’ true interpreter and heir, and who selected Hippocrates ‘to personify medical authority’. 20 In his McGovern lecture of 1998, Paul Potter, who translated a number of the most recently published volumes of the Loeb Classical Library Hippocrates, argued that the proposition that Hippocrates wrote none of the treatises in the Hippocratic Corpus was as improbable as the claim that he wrote them all.21 But which treatises, if any? Th e sixty or so treatises included in the Hippocratic Corpus remain, as Wesley Smith put it, ‘stubbornly anonymous’.22 Ann Hanson goes further: ‘there is nothing to connect “Hippocrates”, the famous physician from Cos mentioned by Plato and Aristotle, with any single medical treatise in our present Hippocratic Corpus ’. 23 As summarized by Geoff rey Lloyd in 1991, when he revisited his 1975 article on the historic ‘Hippocratic question’ – which if any of the treatises is by Hippocrates? – ‘the evidence we have allows us in no case to be confi dent that a work is by Hippocrates himself’ [author’s italics]. 24 I n a later work he reiterated the point that ‘None can reliably be attributed to Hippocrates himself, the famous doctor mentioned by both Plato and Aristotle . Many treatises are, in any case, compilations, the work of several diff erent writers.’ 25 When it came to the big picture Galen, while he agreed that one treatise may contain the work of more than one author, thought very diff erently: work attributed to Hippocrates could be authentic.
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