Jacques Jouanna (translated by Neil Allies, edited with a Preface by Philip van der Eijk), Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen

This volume comprises a selection of papers by Jacques Jouanna, Professor Emeritus at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). These sixteen papers are being published in English (translated from French) for the first time. They span a wide chronological period and are presented in (an approximate) chronological order: the volume opens with a discussion of the interaction of ancient Egyptian medicine and ancient Greek medicine, and concludes with a survey of the development of the theory of the four humours in Late Antique and Byzantine medicine. Serendipitously, publication coincided with 40th anniversary of the Colloque International Hippocratique, which was founded by Jouanna in order to facilitate study of the medical writings of the Hippocratic Corpus. The justification for republishing these papers in English, provided by Professor Philip van der Eijk in his editorial preface, is the increased interest in ancient medicine in the Anglophone world outside the field of Classics. He notes the proliferation of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes provided by British and North American universities, as well as the endeavours of members of the medical profession and wider social and cultural discourses on health and well-being. This is occurring, however, in the context of a decline in the knowledge of both ancient and modern languages, and while efforts are being made to provide English translations of ancient medical texts, the approach to foreign language scholarship on them has been much less systematic and comprehensive. To a degree, the requirements of translating French (not to mention French translations of Greek and Latin) dictated the selection of papers included here, but full details are given of the original publications, in addition to the inclusion of numerous references to other works by Jouanna.

Ancient history · Antique · Archaeology · Art · Byzantine architecture · Context (archaeology) · Hippocratic Oath · Order (exchange) · Period (music) · Political science · Scholarship · Classics · History · History of Medicine Studies · Law