The words of medicine: sources, meanings, and delights

ideas of maternal and paternal contributions to the creation of the foetus. We do not learn, however, whether the bestowal of paternity was peculiar to medicine or if other arts and sciences also gained a male parent at this time. As might be expected, in the practical arena physicians or communities of physicians who considered themselves the upholders of empiricism, of sound no-nonsense practice, unsullied by theory, have most often invoked Hippocrates. Invocations of this sort dealt with here include those of Thomas Sydenham and his circle, the fellows of the eighteenth-century Royal Society concerned to develop medical meteorology, the physicians of Paris medicine and Antebellum American doctors. All the authors dealing with these communities attempt to understand the defences of empiricism and the use of Hippocrates in a wider context. Other essays in the volume, however, remind us just how much texts can be manipulated. That Hippocrates might be used to endorse theory rather than practice seems unlikely at first sight. Yet Jole Shackelford in his chapter on the Paracelsian doctor Petrus Severinus shows exactly that. It was not the case, however, that chemical philosophers were united in their appeal to the Greek sage. In one of Andrew Cunningham's examples of the use of Hippocrates in the seventeenth century, the chemical physician Marchmont Nedham shows downright hostility to the great man. Non-use is as intriguing as use. This is Robert Martensen's theme. Martensen looks at the Oxford circle around Thomas Willis and finds not hostility to Hippocrates, simply indifference. Martensen speculates that since the Puritan doctors had appropriated Hippocrates and made him the father of plain speaking and an opponent of speculation he was of little use to Royalist theoreticians. The ethical uses of Hippocrates are modern, no doubt because in one sense medical ethics are modern. In Susan Lederer's essay on early twentieth-century America, Hippocrates enters the public sphere, on stage, screen and in paperback. At this time, critics of the profession dragged the oath through the mud of fee-splitting and illegal abortion to show how modern doctors had fallen from the standards set by the physician of Cos. Three essays on France, Britain and Germany in the inter-war years conclude the volume. The Hippocrates of this period is hard to sum up, although he clearly was employed to organize nostalgia for an organic lost world where the doctor was treated as a priest and the healing power …