Hippocrate: Pour une archéologie de l'École de Cnide

The Hippocratic Corpus-that collection of anonymous medical texts from the fifth, fourth, and later centuries B.C.-is like an archaeological site. Some of the buildings are still complete, but we have lost the architectural context in which they once stood. Some are mere fragments, parts of a fagade, or foundations from which we have to reconstruct imaginatively the original elevation. There are traces too of remodelling and rebuilding, which indicate that the site was occupied over a considerable length of time: we must attempt to date these periods. We can be certain of very little, except that these are the material remains of a coherent intellectual community with a continuity of tradition, but also with a vigorous impulse toward innovation. What we know of Greek philosophy, literature and art in the fifth and fourth centuries indicates that the pace of intellectual change was phenomenally rapid, and this must surely have been true of medical science as well. But we are not yet in a position to write a history of Greek medicine in those two centuries, only a description. That is the importance of the two studies reviewed here. The subtitle of Jouanna's book explicitly draws the archaeological analogy, while Grensemann too refers to "Schichten", layers or strata, in the texts which he analyses. Both attempt a reconstruction of the so-called "School of Cnidos". We know that medicine was taught (in some sense), from at least the early fifth century, at Cnidos, the peninsular Greek settlement in southwest Asia Minor, just as it was on the nearby island of Cos, with which Hippocrates himself was associated. Modem historians from the time of Littre and Ermerins have imagined a certain rivalry between the schools of Cos and Cnidos, on the model of the rivalries between the later schools of Hellenistic times. They suppose a situation which is familiar enough in the history of science: the Coan school, perhaps Hippocrates himself, criticizes the Cnidians for their "unscientific" approach to medical treatment, for their obsession with the listing of symptoms and with the minute subdivision of diseases to the neglect of a sophisticated and flexible treatment. The Cnidians provide (in modem jargon) the "paradigm" in reaction to which the Coans evolve their own new approach to medicine, an approach based upon prognostic understanding of the course of the disease rather than upon its static description, and upon understanding of the individual constitution (PHUSIS) of …