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The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates
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About This Book
A preeminent classics scholar revises the history of medicine. Medical thinking and observation were radically changed by the ancient Greeks, one of their great legacies to the world. In the fifth century BCE, a Greek doctor put forward his clinical observations of individual men, women, and children in a collection of case histories known as the Epidemics. Among his working principles was the famous maxim "Do no harm." In The Invention of Medicine , acclaimed historian Robin Lane Fox puts these remarkable works in a wider context and upends our understanding of medical history by establishing that they were written much earlier than previously thought. Lane Fox endorses the ancient Greeks' view that their texts' author, not named, was none other than the father of medicine, the great Hippocrates himself. Lane Fox's argument changes our sense of the development of scientific and rational thinking in Western culture, and he explores the consequences for Greek artists, dramatists and the first writers of history. Hippocrates emerges as a key figure in the crucial change from an archaic to a classical world. Elegantly written and remarkably learned, The Invention of Medicine is a groundbreaking reassessment of many aspects of Greek culture and city life.
Reviews
"Fox, in his characteristic thoughtfully argumentative and practical style, sifts through centuries of epigraphic, numismatic, and archaeological evidence to place the so-called Epidemic texts in a new context ..."
"The reader does not need medical or philosophical knowledge to follow this clear and interesting text."
"[Fox] is consistently thorough and logically coherent as he delves into the language, style, and content of the texts ..."
"in part a very erudite detective story in which the author uses the tools of archeology and philology to shed light on a 'remarkable doctor and thinker' ..."
"Scholars will argue over how persuasive is Lane Fox's long argument for the earlier date, based on vocabulary, on the types of diseases (no war wounds) and on inscriptions and remains ("the most massive erect penis to survive in Greek sculpture")."
"Fox presents an enlightening discussion of the origins of the West's medical profession."
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