Jouanna Jacques. Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers

Translated by Neil Allies. Edited with a Preface by Philip van der Eijk. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2012 — xx + 403 p. — (Studies in Ancient Medicine 40) — ISSN: 0925-1421, ISBN: 978-90-04-20859-9; ISBN: 978-90-04-23254-9.The purpose of this volume is to make available for the first time in English translation a selection of Jacques Jouanna’s papers on medicine in the Graeco-Roman world. Following the enthusiastic reception of Hippocrates (1999), the English translation of his 1992 monograph Hippocrate, this project hardly needs justification. Interest in ancient medicine has continued to grow, especially in the anglophone world,2 where the subject appears frequently in undergraduate courses and graduate programmes at British and North American Universities. Moreover, ancient medicine continues to command broad appeal among members of the medical profession and in wider social and cultural discourse on issues such as health and disability, life style and quality of life, happiness and flourishing, medical ethics, the body and gender. A project “Accessing Ancient Medicine” was initiated at the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine at Newcastle University in 2009 (with Wellcome Trust support), subsequently continued at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which aims to make available in English translation a number of key texts in the history and historiography of ancient medicine. The present publication has arisen from this project. For Jacques Jouanna’s work is a powerful example of Continental scholarship that has had an enormous impact on the study of ancient medicine over the last forty years. In the early 1970s, Jouanna founded the Colloque International Hippocratique and thus created a major focus for the study of the medical writings transmitted under the name of Hippocrates. Since its inception in Strasburg in 1972, the Colloque has been held every three or four years and it has acted like a strong magnet for scholars in ancient medicine, providing a training ground for a younger generation of PhD students and junior postdocs and a venue for them to present their work. Yet the purpose and, one hopes, the value of this volume does not just lie in its provision of English translation, or in the practical convenience of having gathered in one volume a number of papers whose original publication was scattered over a wide range of sometimes rather specialised volumes. A further, and potentially even more weighty point of presenting a selection of Jacques Jouanna’s papers in the context of one collection is to highlight certain dominant strands in scholarship on ancient medicine to which he has made major, innovative contributions. This, indeed, has been the most important criterion underlying the selection of the papers for this volume, apart from considerations of interest for a wider than just philological readership and from practical considerations of translatability.