ABSTRACT
This essay explores the various meanings of Hippocratism in France and particularly the growing identification of that term with a certain kind of medical holism. As the various essays in this book collectively demonstrate, Hippocrates has, in the course of history, been identified with and made to represent a bewildering variety of medical values and ideologies. Much the same was true in France during the nineteenth century when many different readings and representations of Hippocrates coexisted easily, if not always peacefully. I will briefly illustrate this nineteenth-century pluralism of meanings before concentrating on the twentieth-century appropriation by French holists of the ‘father of medicine’.
