ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the major methodological problems facing the history of medicine in antiquity, especially that of matching the ancients’ categories with our own. How far can we use our own biomedical knowledge to interpret ancient texts? The evidence is usually too indeterminate to give secure retrospective diagnoses. The identification of the herbs used in materia medica is often uncertain. The ancients’ own ideas about diseases and their causes were disputed in antiquity itself. Nevertheless, if carefully conducted, the study can deliver a profounder appreciation of human understandings of health and well-being and of what undermines them.
