Customer Reviews

Hippocrates (Medicine and Culture)

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If someone wants to read a single book in English to discover the wonders of the Hippocratic Corpus, there can be no hesitation: it's Jouanna's "Hippocrates." It is magisterial but extremely readable: the entire book consists of engaging 1-3 page essays on subjects chosen for their importance but also for their fascination. That's not to say the book is incoherent; these mini-essays nicely build up into a treatment of the larger chapter subjects (e.g. "The Birth of the Human Sciences," "The Reaction Against Philosophy"). The only reader I could imagine disappointed in Jouanna's treatment is the one who would like the ancient medical ideas constantly related to modern ones. Jouanna is interested in giving the reader an understanding of how the Hippocratic physicians thought and worked (including those careful observations that can still be respected by modern doctors), but he will never answer a question like, "So is there any modern medical fact corresponding to the ancient notion that eight-months' babies faced more challenges to survival to seven-months' babies?"

One serious and one less serious complaint about the English edition. The paperback is the worst-manufactured scholarly book I can remember reading, and JHU Press should be ashamed. I got it out from the library and read it once, and it is in pieces, with at least two pages entirely detached. It's the cheapest glue-job you can imagine.

The translation falls a bit short; there are times when I feel glad I know French and Greek because the translator has not really found the way all the way over to the natural English equivalent. For example, we read "arithmology" instead of "numerology," and other Hellenisms/Gallicisms are frequent. That said, don't let this deter you, because in general the book reads very fluently. There are some signs that the book would have been better handled by editors who knew Classics better: the book retains French transliteration of Greek (only a matter of missing & discrepant diacritics from the English point of view, but still odd), it syllabifies Pha-edo, etc.

The previous review writer seems to have misunderstood the review presented above. The review, in fact, DOES allude to Jouanna's text. The Loeb version is merely discussed in Jouanna's text in the "Notes" section.