ABSTRACT
History is an art of forgetting as well as of remembrance. Many of the voices of the past, especially of the losers in any conflict, can be heard faintly at best, and the further back in time we go the larger the gaps in our understanding. The two millennia or more separating us from the ancient Greeks and Romans mean that any comprehensive reconstruction of their ideas on health and healing is fraught with problems. The vicissitudes of the written word over the centuries have drastically narrowed the range of material to a mere fraction of what once existed. As a result, the fact of survival has given prominence to certain documents and has imposed a way of thinking about them that at times distorts the historical reality. By looking back in this chapter at this process of destruction, and by setting out in general some of the consequences for our understanding of the past, I hope to stress both the fragility of our historical information and the need to be open to alternative interpretations of what does survive.1
