Korean J Med Hist.
1997 Jul;6(1):105-120.
Hippocratic Tradition: Recent Historiographies since 19th Century
- Affiliations
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- 1Department of Liberal Arts, Kwan Dong University, Korea.
Abstract
- This paper reviews historiographies on Greek medicine and aims at understanding the Hippocratic tradition. In western medicine, Hippocrates has always been an ideal of the physicians. While the importance of Hippocrates has declined with the advance of modern medical knowledge and he is no longer assumed to be the man of all medical wisdom, his name still represents an ethical code and the importance of the works associated with his name becomes still alive. The Hippocratic collections, Corpus Hippocraticum, throw light not only on the origins and early development of classical medicine, but on its place in Greek society. In the course of reviewing, some issues about the Corpus, including 'the Hippocratic Question', shall be discussed. Although numerous modern scholars have attempted to identify within the Corpus the genuine works of Hippocrates himself -a problem that already had exercised the ancient commentators including Galen-, none have succeeded in this attempt definitely. The Corpus is evidently the works of many medical writers, belonging to different groups or schools and representing quite opposed viewpoints. Thus apart from the school of Cos, associated with Hippocrates himself, the rival school of Cnidus was probably responsible for several of the works in the Corpus. But Hippocrates and the Corpus were regarded as more or less coextensive, and although a scholar in citing a text as authority might remark that it was thought not to be by Hippocrates, he would cite it none the less. Regarding this point, I have examined some trends grouping the Corpus in the Hippocratic tradition in the fourth section. From the point of Hippocratic tradition, Galen's position marked a turning point. What was crucial was that Galen saw him as the originator of rational medicine. And in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were many leading medical writers who continued to express their admiration for Hippocrates including Paracelsus, Sydenham, and Boerhaave. They admired Hippocrates because of his detailed clinical observations and the examples he set of the doctor's devotion and concern for his patients. But one must distinguish between the idealization of Hippocrates as a doctor and the idealization of him as a medical and biological theorist. It is one thing to represent him as a skillful physician and it is another to accept his views on problem of medical theory. Modern scholarship could have distinguished both between different phases in the growth of Hippocrates' reputation and between the different pictures of Hippocrates that were presented.
