The Invention of Medicine

From Homer to Hippocrates

Robin Lane Fox

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English

Penguin
05 October 2022

History; Classical history & classical civilisation; Classical Greek & Roman archaeology; Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500; History of science

A striking reappraisal of the beginnings of medicine, by one of the world's leading ancient historians

Medicine is one of the great fields of achievement of the Ancient Greeks. Hippocrates is celebrated worldwide as the father of medicine and the Hippocratic Oath is admired throughout the medical profession as a founding statement of ethics and ideals. In the fifth century BC, Greeks even wrote of medicine as a newly discovered craft they had invented.

Robin Lane Fox's remarkable book puts their invention of medicine in a wider context, from the epic poems of Homer to the first doctors known to have been active in the Greek world. He examines what we do and do not know about Hippocrates and his Oath and the many writings that survive under his name. He then focuses on seven core texts which give the case histories of named individuals, showing that books 1 and 3 belong far earlier than previously recognised. Their re-dating has important consequences for the medical awareness of the great Greek dramatists and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Robin Lane Fox pieces together the doctor's thinking from his terse observations and relates it in a new way to the history of Greek prose and ideas.

By: Robin Lane Fox
Imprint: Penguin
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 24mm
Weight: 326g
ISBN: 9780141983967
ISBN 10: 0141983965
Pages: 432
Publication Date: 05 October 2022
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Robin Lane Fox was born in 1946 and educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of New College and University Reader in ancient History. Since 1979 he has been weekly gardening correspondent of the Financial Times. Alexander the Great won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award on its first publication in 1973.

Reviews for The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates

In this engaging history by the biographer of Alexander the Great, lightened with wry donnish wit... readers can enjoy a vivid ride through a part of Greece little visited in either body or mind. -- Peter Stothard * Financial Times *