ABSTRACT
The Hippocratic Epidemics case reports is an example of a text whose intended audiences, despite the ambiguities and historical uncertainties about the texts' composition and transmission, were very firmly delimited as professional and medical. This chapter focuses on medical texts as items in a communication, "speech acts" that can reveal information about their own target audiences, and concentrates on one specific group of texts belonging to the Hippocratic Corpus: the patient reports found in the various books of the Epidemics. It explores some of the most notable formal features of the Hippocratic patient cases in terms of audience effect. The chapter looks at the audiences of the texts as the primary, concrete reason for their existence in that precise form. The mnemonics ancient medical audiences needed and employed were also very different from contemporary medical mnemonics, mostly first-letter acronyms, although both are motivated by the urgency of recalling needed knowledge.
