The Hippocratic literary corpus comprises many volumes that modern analysis shows, like other ancient texts, were written over many years and by different authors. The name Hippocrates does not appear anywhere in these writings, but over the centuries they have been attributed to a great physician with that name. Robin Lane Fox’s fascinating investigation of Epidemics volumes 1 and 3 from this corpus reveals evidence that they were written by a single revolutionary physician presenting 42 case studies from a few years spent on the north Agean island of Thasos about 470 BCE. He proposes that the author was Hippocrates himself.

RLF discusses the cases in detail extracting from them and from his formidable knowledge of the ancient world multiple clues to support his theory. The cases include the first description of a patient with melancholia; no treatments are described; the word diagnosis is not used (RLF reminds us of the importance of prognosis in the ancient world [has this changed?]); the great principle ‘first do no harm’ is mentioned; and the gods are not mentioned.

Along the way there are many interesting big and small facts including a discussion of the Oath of Hippocrates and a discussion of modern attempts to retrospectively diagnose these patients. Diseases whose identities seem likely include cirrhosis or hepatoma, malaria, mumps, tuberculosis, and possible puerperal fever. Others that are more speculative are Weil’s disease, Behcet’s syndrome, diptheria, erysipelas, typhus, and typhoid fever.

Lastly, I was pleased to hear that one of the later texts advises that a doctor should be of good color with a nice fleshiness.
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I felt mislead by the reviews I used to pick up this book. I was hoping for a noverview of the history of the ideas in bronze age medicine. Instead the book covers how the information we have about this time has been deduced from a variety of writings and artifacts. What it does it does well and is very readable. It was interesting to me to see how little primary source material on Hippocrates and his teachings are available, and how the small threads are stitched together by historians. ( )