ABSTRACT

This volume focuses on the relationship between Greek medical texts and their audience(s), offering insights into how not only the backgrounds and skills of medical authors but also the contemporary environment affected issues of readership, methodology and mode of exposition. One of the volume’s overarching aims is to add to our understanding of the role of the reader in the contextualisation of Greek medical literature in the light of interesting case-studies from various – often radically different – periods and cultures, including the Classical (such as the Hippocratic corpus) and Roman Imperial period (for instance Galen), and the Islamic and Byzantine world. Promoting, as it does, more in-depth research into the intricacies of Greek medical writings and their diverse revival and transformation from the fifth century BC down to the fourteenth century AD, this volume will be of interest to classicists, medical historians and anyone concerned with the reception of the Greek medical tradition.

Chapters 3, 6, and 9 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. 

part 5I|60 pages

The Classical world

chapter 1|23 pages

Alcmaeon and his addressees

Revisiting the incipit *

chapter 2|18 pages

Gone with the wind

Laughter and the audience of the Hippocratic treatises

chapter 3|17 pages

The professional audiences of the Hippocratic Epidemics

Patient cases in Hippocratic scientific communication 1

part 65II|45 pages

The Imperial world

part 111III|39 pages

The Islamic world

chapter 6|18 pages

The user-friendly Galen

Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and the adaptation of Greek medicine for a new audience

part 151IV|79 pages

The Byzantine world

chapter 8|27 pages

Physician versus physician

Comparing the audience of On the Constitution of Man by Meletios and Epitome on the Nature of Men by Leo the Physician *

chapter 9|50 pages

Reading Galen in Byzantium

The fate of Therapeutics to Glaucon *