Health for sale: quackery in England, 1660–1850

confessed inadequacy of Hippocratic priorities when confronted with the probings of the true philosopher. Yet even in apparent defeat, Hippocrates triumphs, for he has learned from Democritus and, so it is implied, incorporated what he has learned into his medicine. Christianity was, however, different from Greek philosophy. True, in its theology and, largely, in its ethics, Hippocratic medicine was neutral, easily assimilable to Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, but its emphasis on natural, bodily health was not always compatible with a religion whose adherents could view disease as divine testing, and asceticism as a qualification for sainthood. In the accounts in the Gospels and Acts, Christianity had precedents for a truly Christian healing that was at variance as much with Hippocratic healing as with charismatic exorcists and with Asclepius cult. The later attempts of Origen and Macarius to define the healing appropriate for Christians reveal the complexities of the relationship. Temkin is right to stress the general lack of hostility to secular medicine, and his exposition of such ambiguous texts as the Epistle of James and the Oration of Tatian points to a more positive view of medicine than is usually granted. But, at the same time, these formulations could (and still do) give rise to a rejection of secular healing of the body that goes far beyond the rejection of the claims of Hippocratic medicine to treat also the mind or soul. Nor is the rise of the healing shrines of saints as unimportant, or unprecedented, as the few pages devoted to it here might suggest. In one sense, Temkin's Hippocrates is Hamlet without the prince, for the victory of Galenism, so well analysed by Temkin himself in 1973, also confirmed the primacy of Hippocrates. As Lloyd shows in one of his essays, Galen's version of Hippocrates was not shared by all Hippocratics, and it was the success of Galenism in driving out alternatives that imposed the Hippocratism familiar to us today. It is relevant to note that Galen wrote a commentary on the Hippocratic Oath, partly edited and translated into English by Franz even more, that what survives (perhaps as much as a quarter of the whole) is concerned with it from an antiquarian rather than an ethical viewpoint. Galen's apparent failure to mention the Oath in the recently discovered On examining the best physician, and, indeed, to cite it frequently in his writings, suggests that its adoption as …