The name of Hippocrates has been invoked as an inspiration of medicine since antiquity, and medical practitioners have turned to Hippocrates for ethical and social standards. While most modern commentators accept that medicine has sometimes fallen short of Hippocratic ideals, these ideals are usually portrayed as having a timeless appeal, departure from which is viewed as an aberration that only a return to Hippocratic values will correct. Recent historical work has begun to question such an image of Hippocrates and his medicine. Instead of examining Hippocratic ideals and values as an unchanging legacy passed to us from antiquity, historians have increasingly come to explore the many different ways in which Hippocrates and his medicine have been constructed and reconstructed over time. Thus scholars have tended to abandon attempts to extract a real Hippocrates from the mass of conflicting opinions about him. Rather, they tend to ask why he was portrayed in particular ways, by particular groups, at particular times. This volume explores the multiple uses, constructions, and meanings of Hippocrates and Hippocratic medicine since the Renaissance, and elucidates the cultural and social circumstances that shaped their development. Recent research has suggested that whilst the process of constructing and reconstructing Hippocrates began during antiquity, it was during the sixteenth century that the modern picture emerged. Many scholastic endeavours today, it is claimed, are attempts to answer Hippocratic questions first posed in the sixteenth century. This book provides an opportunity to begin to evaluate such claims, and to explore their relevance in areas beyond those of classical scholarship.
List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Notes on Contributros ix Introduction: The Uses and Meanings of Hippocrates 1(20) David Cantor PART I Renaissance Constructions of Hippocratism The Power of Paternity: The Father of Medicine Meets the Prince of Physicians 21(16) Helen King Hippocrates and the Construction of `Progress in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Medicine 37(22) Thomas Rutten The Chemical Hippocrates: Paracelsian and Hippocratic Theory in Petrus Severinus Medical Philosophy 59(32) Jole Shackelford PART II The Transformations of Hippocratism in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-century Britain The Transformation of Hippocrates in Seventeenth-century Britain 91(25) Andrew Cunningham Hippocrates and the Politics of Medical Knowledge in Early Modern England 116(20) Robert L. Martensen Hippocrates, Bacon, and Medical Meteorology at the Royal Society, 1700-1750 136(21) Andrea Rusnock PART III Hippocratism in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century France and North America Hippocrates and the Montpellier Vitalists in the French Medical Enlightenment 157(21) Elizabeth A. Williams The Rhetoric of Hippocrates at the Paris School 178(22) Ann F. La Berge Making History in American Medical Culture: The Antebellum Competition for Hippocrates 200(39) John Harley Warner PART IV Twentieth-century Hippocratic Revivals Hippocrates American Style: Representing Professional Morality in Early Twentieth-century America 239(18) Susan E. Lederer Hippocrates, Holism and Humanism in Interwar France 257(23) George Weisz The Name and the Word: Neo-Hippocratism and Language in Interwar Britain 280(22) David Cantor A Model for the New Physician: Hippocrates in Interwar Germany 302(23) Carsten Timmermann Index 325
David Cantor, National Cancer Institute, USA David Cantor, Helen King, Thomas Rutten, Jole Shackelford, Andrew Cunningham, Robert L. Martensen, Andrea Rusnock, Elizabeth A. Williams, Ann F. La Berge, John Harley Warner, Susan E. Lederer, George Weisz, Carsten Timmermann.
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