Biblical and Talmudic medicine

first with the poetic view of mind, with examples from Homer and the tragedians, second with the philosopher's, i.e. largely Plato's, and finally with the medical, i.e. the early Hippocratic texts. All three approaches are combined in a discussion of hysteria, in which he also stresses the social and sexual prohibitions of Athenian women and the ambivalent, yet often effective, distancing of the doctor from his hysterical patient. There is much to praise here: the account of mental disorder in poetry goes beyond Dodds' famous description of irrationality, and chapters 11 to 13 give in a short space many perceptive insights into early Greek medicine. One may take exception to some details: e.g. the naive dismissal of the consequences of Edelstein's view of Hippocrates, or the occasional belief in the Hippocratic corpus as embodying all Greek medicine. It is true that extant early representations of melancholy/black bile seem more to satisfy a theoretical need than to rest on observation, but later doctors, relying on earlier sources, cf. p. 228, certainly recognized its physical properties, however baffling they may be to us. But it is only with Platonic philosophy that the author's modernist tendencies triumph. Instead of a detailed discussion of relevant passages in the Phaedrus and the Timaeus (e.g. 89B-C, which has medical implications), we are treated to an analysis of the Republic which often becomes a psychoanalysis of Plato with the political and social background left out. But, for the most part, Freudian psychohistory is kept away, and the author rarely descends to unintelligible jargon. Like the sociologist Alvin Gouldner's Enter Plato, this book poses new and searching questions for students of Classical Greece, and should not be lightly discarded because of occasional unprofessional conduct oflanguage. A second volume on madness and reactions to it in the Hellenistic and Roman periods would be most welcome, especially as Galen prefers to see only the rational crust on a seething cauldron of doubts, fears, and irrational disorders. This new version of Preuss's magnificent collection of data on Jewish medicine cannot fail to be warmly recommended. As well as providing an accurate version (such errors as exist are trivial), Dr. Rosner has enlarged the index, expanded many of Preuss's references, and prefaced the work with a moving invocation of its author. It would have been even better if, instead of the summary of chapters and details of the careers of Preuss's descendants, …