ABSTRACT
When the Anonymus Londinensis papyrus was first published, in 1893, it created a considerable stir because it contradicted what had for centuries been the traditional understanding of Hippocratic medicine.1 The immediate debate centred largely upon the so-called Hippocratic question, the identification of the source or sources of the ideas attributed in the papyrus to the historical Hippocrates, and upon the authorship, and by implication the reliability, of the doxographical sections that the anonymous author had taken over from Aristotle.2 Less attention was given to the actual theories described in the papyrus, despite the fact that many of the authors named in it were previously unknown. That many of them flourished in the first half of the fourth century was a further reason to omit them from consideration in a study of Hippocratic medicine in the fifth. This excuse for neglect becomes less cogent, however, when one examines the Hippocratic Corpus as a whole (since many of the texts contained therein are likely also to come from the fourth century), and it is certainly out of place in any study of Greek medicine in general.
