For anyone studying ancient Greek medicine, Jacques Jouanna’s monograph Hippocrates is indispensable for its scholarliness, knowledge and readability. Similar qualities suffuse the present volume, which has been compiled with the dual aim of making a selection of Jouanna’s papers available for the first time in English and highlighting key strands in scholarship on ancient medicine. The chronological scope of both subject matter (classical Greece to the Byzantine period) and original publication dates (1980–2008) is wide, so that both the breadth and the depth of Jouanna’s knowledge and interests are showcased, though a special affinity with Hippocratic matters is evident throughout. Philip van der Eijk has helpfully arranged the material (selected in consultation with Jouanna) in three parts: one, setting classical Greek medicine in its historical, literary and cultural context; two, covering aspects of Hippocratic medicine and their relationship with philosophical thought; and three, analysing the reception of Hippocratic medicine in Galen and late antiquity.

Chapter 1 shows how Greek medicine was influenced by the Egyptians, and discusses the Hellenocentrism that subsequently downplayed that influence. Delving into medicine’s origins while simultaneously introducing the idea of Galen’s selective refashioning of history, it is a neat scene-setter. ‘Champollion never had the opportunity to decipher a medical papyrus’ must also be among the more arresting opening sentences to grace a scholarly collection. The next chapter highlights the validity of medical metaphor in Athenian politics of the later fifth century, as evidenced by the ‘remarkable agreement’ between Thucydides and Regimen in Acute Diseases on the problem of change and habit, while Chapter 3 explains the relevance of the Hippocratic lectures and discourses to understanding the development of rhetoric in the fifth century. Jouanna’s conclusion, that these oral works were composed by doctors who were orators rather than vice versa, is backed up with some telling points about the value of rhetoric to a doctor who wanted to succeed. The benefits of examining medical history in its cultural context are confirmed by a trio of chapters, two on tragedy and one on religion, addressing the apparently paradoxical co-existence in classical Athens of ‘rational’ Hippocratic medicine alongside beliefs in the aetiological and healing powers of gods: opposition to superstition and magic should not, Jouanna argues, be taken for evidence of atheism. It is a pity that there is no later discussion of the cultural context within which Galen worked, since aspects of that culture heavily influenced both his approach to medicine and his self-presentation, two things which are difficult to disentangle. That said, the chapters on the fifth century context are highly informative and stimulating.

The second section is thematically the least homogeneous of the three. Its advertised ‘common thread’, relationship with ideas in the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and Empedocles, is quite loose, with the chapters on dietetics and wine constituting essentially medical, although nonetheless valuable, surveys of their topics. The section opens with a chapter on miasma, a notion whose significance in post-Hippocratic medicine has, Jouanna argues, been over-emphasised in modern scholarship. After a chapter explicitly exploring connections between the treatise Regimen and the ideas of Empedocles and Plato, a chapter on melancholy provides a useful summary of the origins and development of humoral theory and the difference between black bile (invented in Hippocratic medicine), the theory of melancholic temperament (rarely attested in the corpus), and the illness called ‘melancholy’ (clearly pre-Hippocratic). A discussion of the later fortunes of the concept of melancholy illustrates semantic expansion at work, and encourages us to beware of assuming that different ancient authors mean the same thing by the same words.

The first three chapters of part three, which variously discuss Galen’s reading of Hippocratic ethics and ideas about nature, illustrate his tendency to appropriate Hippocratic material for his own purposes. Jouanna demonstrates, for example, how Galen recast Aristotle’s role in the enquiry into nature as that of Hippocratic exegete, privileging the role of doctors over that of philosophers to make Hippocrates the father not only of medicine but also of philosophy. The idea of Hippocrates as the doctor par excellence and Galen as his student persists through to Byzantine medicine, as Jouanna shows in his final chapter, a discussion of humoral theory and its reception and development in Galenic and post-Galenic medicine. There is overlap and repetition between the chapters on ethics and nature, as there is occasionally elsewhere in the volume; some editorial cross-referencing would have been helpful, since some discussions of certain ideas are fuller than others.

Overall this is an excellent and extremely useful collection, although there are some quibbles. The index is satisfactory but by no means comprehensive. There are occasional orthographical inconsistencies and inaccuracies in referencing. And it is a pity that the fine idea of making this important work available in English is marred by an English translation of uneven quality. There are turns of phrase that sound more French than English, for example ‘When Darius twists his foot, he firstly summons for the Egyptian doctors’, and ‘It is only since Asclepius that medicine was truly discovered’, and the odd howler, such as ‘a predominately negative response’. The translation task in a work of this nature includes, of course, the challenge of rendering into English the author’s French translations of the Greek texts he quotes, and van der Eijk refers with some diffidence to the difficulties that this entails; it is perhaps this that accounts for oddities such as ‘zelot’ (sic) as a translation for $\zeta \eta \lambda \omega \tau \acute {\eta } \varsigma $, though in the accompanying footnote the word is rendered ‘supporter’. Confusingly, the Hippocratic texts are referenced in the chapters by English titles, but in Latin in the Index of Passages Cited, which will reduce the usefulness of the latter for some readers. The multiplicity of ways of referring to ancient medical texts is one of the more rebarbative aspects of this field of scholarship, and it is regrettable that the admirably clear conventions adopted by Jouanna in his Hippocrates have not been employed here. In the Index of Passages Cited, curiously, some of the names of individual works have been given English translations in brackets, on an apparently arbitrary basis, rather as if someone embarked on the task of translating them but never finished the job. Both space and clarity would have been well served by simply giving them all in English, or at least by maintaining consistency throughout.

These comparatively minor complaints do not detract from the overall appeal of the book, a rich and enjoyable compendium which will rapidly justify its place on the shelves of anyone with an interest in ancient medicine and is likely to yield new insights for even the most seasoned of scholars.