The anatomy of ancient Greece

The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates

Author: Robin Lane Fox

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 402

Price: Rs 699

This is, on its own terms, a fascinating work of scholarship written in a dryly humorous, accessible style. But the title is misleading and most Indian readers would find it a little too narrow and occidental in scope.

The book is not about medicine, or even the evolution of medical theory. The author is a professor of Ancient History at New College, Oxford, and a leading scholar of classical Greek. He writes about the world of the ancient Greeks as mirrored in medical texts, and in the references to medical events (if one may use that term loosely) found in Greek literature, art, sports and philosophy.

The period under examination is roughly 700 BCE -100 CE. There are few references to contemporaneous medical texts, or the state of the art of medical practice in other parts of the world, except insofar as those impinged on Hellenic consciousness. While it is understandable that Professor Fox sticks within the ambit of what he knows best, and he is brilliant within those bounds, Indians, Egyptians, Chinese, Iraqis, et al, may be disappointed.

Nonetheless, the book is a rewarding read even for people from non-occidental backgrounds. It provides a sideways look at the great epics and plays of Greece, from an entirely different perspective. 

It includes several chapters of textual exposition and analysis of the so-called “Corpus” —  the 70-odd prose treatises attributed to Hippocrates. There is an attempt to disentangle the myths about Hippocrates from the little we know for sure about his life, and an examination of the development of the famous Oath and the less-famous “Law” which governed the conduct of physicians.

There is an intriguing chapter on “Retrospective Diagnosis”, which outlines attempts made by scholar-doctors to diagnose what diseases and injuries Greek doctors treated, and what they guessed or understood about the human anatomy and the ailments it is subject to.

This is a very complex task. Some of the words used may not mean what they do now, and the Greeks knew little about human anatomy and their symptomatic descriptions are often impossible to align with modern medicine. They knew nothing about the female body, about reproductive processes, menopause and the way muscles worked, and very little about diseases, which were often assumed to be divinely inflicted. Epilepsy was considered “the sacred disease”, for instance. There is the possibility some diseases have disappeared or mutated into different forms, while there is little or no evidence of several modern diseases. DNA analysis confirms the presence of cancer and TB in Greece, for example, but DNA analysis cannot be carried out on soft tissues (which degrade completely), and we don’t know for sure if diseases like polio or STDs were prevalent.

The great historian Thucydides meticulously describes a “plague” in Athens — an epidemic he survived. The symptoms don’t match up to anything we can map and the best guess may be a particularly virulent ancestral form of mumps. Herodotus can also be mined for medical descriptions.

The Greeks did know a lot about war wounds and sports-related injuries. Homer includes hundreds of clinical descriptions of war wounds in his epics — so much so that it is suspected that he may have been a war-medic. We learn a lot about the way such injuries were treated including battlefield surgery, the application of tourniquets and use of herbal painkillers. There are other descriptions of less Homeric bodily functions and treatments like emetics and enemas. The poet Sappho describes the physical symptoms of erotic jealousy, while the philosopher Solon coined the analogy of the body politic.

About Hippocrates, there is little known beyond the fact that he was a famous doctor who was active circa 430 BCE on the island of Cos. He was a contemporary of Socrates and an older contemporary of Plato. Many of the texts attributed to him are likely to have been written long after his death, and some may actually have been written in other languages and scripts and translated into Greek. Incidentally, the first known accusations of the heinous crime of defacing library books dates back to some of the Corpus treatises — copies of which went to the Library of Alexandria. There are multiple versions of the Oath and the Law and it’s hard to judge if these were composed by the man, and of course, they have been extensively transformed over millennia. The first authentic references to usage of the oath pop up around 40 CE, while the generally accepted versions of the Corpus are from 16th century Italy.

Professor Fox does an exhaustive analysis of the treatises with some hilarious case studies thrown in. While some of this is tedious, it does give an insight into the places Greek doctors worked. It offers deep insight into their daily lives and professions, alongside glimpses into the arts, sports, sex lives, and social hierarchies of ancient Greece and those bits of the world the Greeks interacted with.

It’s an original way to examine the ancient Greek ecosystem as it delineates the shift by medical practitioners from attempts at inducing divine interventions to rational scientific analysis. There’s nothing to stop a Sanskrit /Pali scholar from adopting a similar approach.