Médecins érudits de Coray à Sigerist. Actes du colloque de Saint-Julien-en-Beaujolais (juin 1994)

The historiography of the history of medicine is still in its infancy, and these essays can thus all be commended for the new information they bring to bear on the lives if their subjects. They form a varied collection. Laennec, Sudhoff and Sigerist are familiar names to modem medical historians; Sprengel, de Renzi, Daremberg, and Haeser wrote major works, once standard and not entirely superseded today; Korais, Ermerins, Bussemaker, and Petrequin are still required reading for the specialist in ancient Greek medicine; but of Broecx and Rosenbaum the glory has long departed. The volume centres upon the Parisian scholar-librarian Charles Victor Daremberg and his circle, and on the period from 1820 to 1870, which is said to mark the transition of classical Greek medicine from a living medical tradition to an object of academic erudition. But this claim is never properly explored, largely because the authors are distinguished philologists, not historians of medicine. There are hints at what might have been achieved in the essays on Sprengel and Laennec, but the significance of Petrequin's work on Hippocratic surgery, for instance, cannot be appreciated without an understanding of debates at the time among French surgeons. This classicist bias might be justified, if the authors could then show just why these longdead writers continue to be read. Unfortunately, only Professor Jouanna, in a typically lucid piece on Korais, and M Touwaide, on Sprengel, explain to the nonclassicist the significance of the methods and achievements of their subjects within their own field of classical philology. For the rest, a list of works, biographical data, and academic gossip suffice. The individual scholars of the past are not discussed within a context of the development of philology, ancient medicine, history, or modem medicine. Antiquarian personal detail, albeit interesting, takes the place of historiographical argument. Only the final two papers, by Dr Rutten on Sudhoff and Professor von Staden on Sigerist, really engage with wider intellectual challenges. Rutten vigorously assaults the image of Sudhoff as the genial Nestor of German medical history, an image carefully fostered and enforced by the great man himself. But his somewhat naive horror at Sudhoff's Nazi last years-given all that had gone before, it would have been surprising if Sudhoff had not joined the party in 1933-is no real substitute for an examination of why and how Sudhoff achieved his primacy as a medical historian. Von Staden's piece, the best in the volume, is also the only one to try to set his theme, Sigerist's engagement with the Greeks, in its intellectual context. He rightly notes the curious self-identification of Germans with the classical Greeks, and Sigerist's typical idealization of the Greek achievement, but I missed a comparison with Jaeger's Paideia, and with other Germans who turned away in the 1920s and 1930s from the "heavy industry" approach to history and philology to the purer world of eternal ideas. Above all, there is no sense in this volume of medical history being written at a time of major changes in both classics and, especially, history. The work of Ha6ser, Daremberg and de Renzi needs to be considered alongside the explosion of documentary collection and editing represented for instance by the Monumenta Germaniae. It is no coincidence that Greenhill, the friend and collaborator of Daremberg, was also a favourite pupil of Thomas Arnold, and acquainted with many of