HIPPOCRATES THE IATROMECHANIST by IAIN

INTRODUCTION THE TITLE of this essay correctly indicates that it is about Hippocrates. Yet the content is largely concerned with the writings of Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742), Professor of Medicine and Physics at Halle from 1693 to 1742, and the author of an influential system of medicine. This requires some explanation. It is about Hippocrates, or the Hippocratic writings, in the sense that it seeks to identify the presence of certain features in them. It approaches this question, however, through the work of Hoffmann, whom it also seeks to understand in certain features of his thought. Hoffmann looked for, and found, characteristics in the Hippocratic corpus which matched those of his own medicine, a medicine which he called "mechanical". This suggests the main question with which the essay is concerned: to what extent are mechanistic features present in the Hippocratic corpus, and in what sense or senses of the word "mechanism"? Hoffmann both prompts this enquiry and maintains it in focus because, just as he is sensitive to some features, so he disregards others, curiously to my mind. In this way, he acts as a useful control upon our prejudices. So Hoffmann also becomes a subject of the essay, since we need to understand what he meant by mechanism, and why he found Hippocratic medicine congenial to it. K. E. Rothschuh has recently pointed out that Hoffmann's position in the history of medical thought has always been difficult to locate.' Historians have described him equally as a mechanist, an animist, or even as a vitalist. Several nineteenth-century historians fastened upon his acquaintance and correspondence2 with G. W. Leibniz,