Hippocrates Now 35999.indb 1 11/07/2019 14:48 Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception presents scholarly monographs offering new and innovative research and debate to students and scholars in the reception of Classical Studies. Each volume will explore the appropriation, reconceptualization and recontextualization of various aspects of the Graeco- Roman world and its culture, looking at the impact of the ancient world on modernity. Research will also cover reception within antiquity, the theory and practice of translation, and reception theory. Also available in the Series: Ancient Magic and the Supernatural in the Modern Visual and Performing Arts, edited by Filippo Carlà & Irene Berti Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989, edited by Justine McConnell & Edith Hall Antipodean Antiquities, edited by Marguerite Johnson Classics in Extremis, edited by Edmund Richardson Frankenstein and its Classics, edited by Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens & Brett M. Rogers Greek and Roman Classics in the British Struggle for Social Reform, edited by Henry Stead & Edith Hall Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War: Dialogues on Tradition, Jan Haywood & Naoíse Mac Sweeney Imagining Xerxes, Emma Bridges Julius Caesar’s Self-Created Image and Its Dramatic Afterlife, Miryana Dimitrova Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Brett M. Rogers & Benjamin Eldon Stevens Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen, Paula James Reading Poetry, Writing Genre, edited by Silvio Bär & Emily Hauser The Codex Fori Mussolini, Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse The Classics in Modernist Translation, edited by Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak The Gentle, Jealous God, Simon Perris Victorian Classical Burlesques, Laura Monrós-Gaspar Victorian Epic Burlesques, Rachel Bryant Davies Also published by Bloomsbury: Greek and Roman Medicine, Helen King Greek Medicine from the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age, James Longrigg A Cultural History of Medicine in Antiquity, edited by Laurence Totelin 35999.indb 2 11/07/2019 14:48 Hippocrates Now The ‘Father of Medicine’ in the Internet Age Helen King 35999.indb 3 11/07/2019 14:48 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Helen King, 2020 Helen King has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Licence. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © yoeml/Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: King, Helen, 1957– author. Title: Hippocrates now : the “father of medicine” in the internet age / Helen King. Description: London ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Series: Bloomsbury studies in classical reception | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “We need to talk about Hippocrates. Current scholarship attributes none of the works of the ‘Hippocratic corpus’ to him, and the ancient biographical traditions of his life are not only late, but also written for their own promotional purposes. Yet Hippocrates features powerfully in our assumptions about ancient medicine, and our beliefs about what medicine – and the physician himself – should be. In both orthodox and alternative medicine, he continues to be a model to be emulated. This book will challenge widespread assumptions about Hippocrates (and, in the process, about the history of medicine in ancient Greece and beyond) and will also explore the creation of modern myths about the ancient world. Why do we continue to use Hippocrates, and how are new myths constructed around his name? How do news stories and the internet contribute to our picture of him? And what can this tell us about wider popular engagements with the classical world today, in memes, ‘quotes’ and online?”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019017436 (print) | LCCN 2019980524 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350005891 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350005907 (epub) | ISBN 9781350005914 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Hippocrates. | Hippocrates–Influence. | Hippocrates–In mass media. | Physicians–Greece–Biography. | Medicine, Greek and Roman–In mass media. | Medicine–Historiography. | Greece–History–To 146 B.C.–Biography–Sources. Classification: LCC R126.H8 K56 2019 (print) | LCC R126.H8 (ebook) | DDC 610.938—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017436 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980524 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0589-1 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0591-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-0590-7 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. 35999_00_FM.indd 4 12/07/2019 09:26 Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii List of Abbreviations x Introduction 1 Receiving Hippocrates 2 Looking like Hippocrates 7 Hairs of Hippocrates 12 Writing this book 14 1 What We Know About Hippocrates 17 2 What We Thought We Knew 19 Hippocrates as God and Galen as his prophet? 22 Finding a Hippocratic treatise 25 Making a Corpus 29 Authors and titles: What is a treatise? 31 Creating the myths: Biographies and pseudepigrapha 35 Being ‘nice’: The personality of Hippocrates 37 Moving beyond the myths 39 3 Sabotaging the Story: What Hippocrates Didn’t Write 43 Writing new stories 44 Wikipedia as a moving target 49 Being the daddy 52 Two decades in the slammer? 55 Spreading the myths 57 The Complicated Body 60 From coercion to freedom 64 4 Needing a Bit of Information: Hippocrates in the News 67 Taking and breaking: The Hippocratic Oath 68 35999.indb 5 11/07/2019 14:48 vi Contents Imhotep and the power of Egyptian medicine 73 Poop proof: Hippocrates’ parasites 78 Julius please her: Hippocratic hysteria 82 A long history? Meanwhile in Babylon 88 The Hippocrates detox diet 91 Conclusion 93 5 Hippocrates in Quotes 95 Flitting like a bee: Becoming a quote 97 First do no harm 101 Walking is the best medicine 105 6 Let Food Be Thy Medicine 111 Back to the source? 115 Which foods? Liver, garlic and watercress 123 Death begins in the gut: Constipation and Hippocrates 127 Conclusion 131 7 The Holistic Hippocrates: ‘Treating the Patient, Not Just the Disease’ 133 The self-healing body 134 Hippocrates in contemporary holistic medicine 138 Invoking Hippocrates through history 145 Hippocrates branded 149 Conclusion 152 Conclusion: Strange Remedies? 155 Notes 161 Bibliography 231 Index 255 35999.indb 6 11/07/2019 14:48 Figures 1 Engraving: portrait of Hippocrates from Francis Clifton, Hippocrates upon Airs, Water and Situation; upon Epidemical Diseases; and upon Prognostics, in Acute Cases especially (London: J. Watts, 1734), frontispiece. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 9 2 Portrait of Hippocrates from Johannes Antonides van der Linden, Magni Hippocratis Coi opera omnia (Lugduni Batavorum [Leiden]: Gaasbeeck, 1663), frontispiece. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 10 3 Daniel Le Clerc, The History of Physick, or, an account of the rise and progress of the art (London: D Brown et al., 1699). Wellcome Collection. CC BY 11 4 A fool is writing an insult on the pedestal of a statue of Hippocrates. Lithograph by Cham, c. 1850. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 156 35999.indb 7 11/07/2019 14:48 Acknowledgements This book had its genesis in the conference organized by David Cantor at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which led to the publication of his edited collection of essays, Reinventing Hippocrates, in 2002. Having written for that collection a piece on the Renaissance Hippocrates, I continued to think about how the reception of this ancient figure is continuing to shift even now. Ten years after that book was published, the development of my project, ‘Hippocrates Electric,’ was supported by The Open University. Thanks to their generosity, Dr Joanna Brown was funded to help me scope the field, and I owe an enormous debt, particularly in Chapters 5 and 7, to her research and writing. Due to the pressures of the day job, the project then stalled until after my retirement in 2017, but writing the sections on ‘How do we know what we know?’ for The Open University’s MA in Classical Studies made me think more deeply about how the internet has – and has not – changed the ways in which we do research and find information. As ever, questions and ideas from students have been important in thinking about the questions I am addressing here, and I would particularly like to thank all who have taken the FutureLearn MOOC I put together on ‘Health and Wellbeing in the Ancient World’; for many of them, returning to education after many years away, the development of their internet literacy has been an important journey. I would also like to record my thanks to those who generously helped me with specific queries on the material I am using here: they include Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Mary Hague-Yearl (Director of the McGill Oslerian Library), Michael H.