Beyond the magic bullet

that scholars and medical men alike have been fooled by a series of attributions devised by Dioscorides and Artemidorus Capito c. A.D. 125 and given greater and almost unshakeable authority by the verbose, argumentative, and persuasive Galen. The main thesis, that the interest in "the true doctrines of Hippocrates" postdates Erasistratus and is the result of the cataloguing in the Alexandrian library of a miscellaneous assemblage of early medical writings; that the commitment to certain "Hippocratic" texts brought with it a desire to explain away divergent tracts and to reassign authorship; and that this process was canonized by Galen and accepted by Western writers from Mercurialis to Deichgriiber, all this is provocative and convincing. Almost halfthe book is devoted to a careful andjustly sceptical examination ofGalen's Hippocratism, which is shown to rest on a combination of fallible learning and tendentious prejudice. Rightly, we are reminded that Galen's arguments are often ad hominem, and that his methods in both scholarship and polemic became more and more refined. The divine Galen is at last revealed as human, and what he saw as his greatest achievement, the completion of the unfinished work of Hippocrates, is exposed to much-needed scrutiny. English readers familiar with the recent work of Lloyd and Lonie will not be surprised at the demonstrable fragility of the "true Hippocrates" thesis, and they may not be convinced by Professor Smith's attempt, perhaps forced on him by the same academic tradition he criticizes, to find in Regimen the one surviving authentic work of the historical Hippocrates. They may also look in vain for a more detailed confrontation of the literary evidence with the epigraphic and archaeological tradition of Cos as expounded by Susan Sherwin-White in Ancient Cos, 1978, but that would well require another long article, if not another book. The weakness of the literary tradition, coming largely from one source, Galen, also casts doubts on the validity of some arguments from silence. "Hippocratism" seems to arise in late-third-century Alexandria: does the debate over authorship have to wait almost four hundred years for the first attributions to Polybus, Thessalus, and other Hippocrates? Can we reconcile Smith's snarling Galen with Ballester's genetic theory of Galenic development as a result of increasing academic and Hippocratic learning? One should also emphasize Galen's antiquarianism, typical ofhis age, when, for example, he could write a tract on Regimen in Acute Diseases according to Hippocrates, for Victorinus (not …