Implicit fever theory in Epidemics 5 and 7.

THE SEVEN books of Epidemics ("Epidemiae": visits to cities) which come to us in the Hippocratic Corpus fall into three groups, Epid. I and 3, Epid. 2, 4, and 6, and Epid. 5 and 7. Like the other works of the Corpus, their authorship, provenance, and dates are in doubt.' Traditionally since Galen's time Epid. I and 3 have been admired as Hippocrates' work or as the work of a "Coan" school connected with Hippocrates, while Epid. 2, 4, and 6 have been judged inferior, later productions of the same school, and Epid. 5 and 7 have been judged yet later and more inferior scientifically. The result has been general neglect of Epid. 5 and 7. My own recent work, looking towards an edition and translation of Epid. 5 and 7, has prompted a reconsideration of them, beginning with this modest paper. I shall lay out my premisses here in a fairly dogmatic way. I have argued elsewhere2 that the Hippocratic Corpus is made up of works assembled from numerous places at the Alexandrian Library in the third century B.C. and subsequently all attributed to Hippocrates. The first serious students of the Corpus, the Empiric physicians, selected out as "most useful" those works nearest to the Empiric techniques of observing and recording symptoms and syndromes without dogmatic assertions of hidden causes. Empirics admired all the Epidemics as Hippocratic, and "most useful". They and others after them had a peculiar affection for Epid. 5 because it has a number of admissions of error by the physician-author. Because of these confessions they called Hippocrates "truth lover".3 Not until centuries after the first studies of their doctrines were the three groups of Epidemics distinguished from one another, initially on grounds of literary style, completeness, etc. Dioscurides and Capiton, the first literary editors of the Corpus, around 100 A.D., conjectured that only Epid. 1 and 3 were finished by Hippocrates for publication, and