Studies in ancient medicine最新文献

The didactic letters prefacing Marcellus's On Drugs are examined. It appears that one reason for writing such didactic letters was to equip the addressee with sufficient knowledge to enable him to avoid consulting a doctor, since there was great dissatisfaction with the quality of service rendered and the fees charged by doctors. The letters in the collection will be shown to represent various levels of healers, from the professional city doctor, to the army doctor, to the educated layman. They will also be scrutinized for evidence of the level of expertise of doctors in the late fourth and fifth centuries. Finally, the evidence will be compared with the criteria set some two centuries earlier by Galen in his blueprint for the examination of physicians.

Starting from the frescoes of the cathedral of Anagni which present an obvious relationship between Hippocrates as Galen's teacher and the medieval image of man's place in the universe dominated by the number four, this paper returns to the origins of this quaternary theory in Hippocratic medicine with the four humors (Nature of Man), then follows its evolution in Galen and finally into late Greek and Byzantine medicine where the quaternary division will have an unprecedented extension, with the four temperaments. In particular, a new piece of evidence from this late period attributed to Hippocrates (the small treatise of Greek Medicine The Pulse and the Human Temperament) appears as the veritable source of the Latin Letter attributed to Vindicianus. Therefore, contrary to what was believed until now, the doctrine of the four temperaments was not elaborated first in a Latin form. Throughout its history, the quaternary theory will remain connected to Hippocrates, but the image and teaching of the Father of Medicine will change as the theory evolves. A second rediscovered treatise of the late period (The Formation of Man) starts with this phrase: 'Words of Hippocrates to Galen his own pupil'. This seems a felicitous commentary to the medical scene in the cathedral of Anagni.

This paper addresses the extent to which one may identify in the author of Epidemics 2, 4 and 6 the personality of a master who shared - and probably led--with several colleagues a research program focused on a few topics which were both used for teaching purposes. The first lines of Epidemics 2.3.1 (the so-called katastasis of Perinthus), are the starting-point of the analysis, where information is given about the arrival in Perinthus of a community of doctors, probably composed by masters and disciples. Further commenting on this difficult passage (where a new establishment ot the text is proposed) in connection with others shows the author either expressing his disagreement with colleagues, or making recommendations to pupils, by words which denote a particularly strong and distinguished personality whose purpose is not to give to the reader a complete description of diseases and symptoms for his observations were in fact determined by precise research considerations. Medical research is in fact, in this group of doctors and pupils arriving in Perinthus where the personality of the author prevails, closely related to the needs of teaching.

This paper explores the ways in which a doctor could use his master's name to enhance his authority and back his claims to being a qualified physician. This is looked at mainly in two contexts: when applying for the position of public physician, and in medical treatises. I argue that the influence of teachers was widely recognised in Greek society. This meant that using the name of one's master to defend one's skills was accepted by both colleagues and laymen and could therefore be used in very different contexts. Sometimes this argument had to be confirmed by witnesses, in which case fellow-pupils or patients treated during a pupil's apprenticeship could come in useful.