(…) especially in the first half of the twentieth century, the interest taken by medical people in Greek and Roman medicine was often motivated, apart from antiquarian intellectual curiosity, by what we could call a positivist, or presentist, attitude. There often was an underlying tendency to look for those respects in which Greek medicine was, as it were, ‘on the right track’, and to measure the extent to which the Greeks ‘already knew’ or ‘did not yet know’ certain things which contemporary biomedicine now knows, or claims to know, to be true.1 This attitude led to a historiography of medicine (and science) which was predominantly conceived as a success story and which was preoccupied with great discoveries such as the nervous system or blood circulation, with heroic medical scientists such as Hippocrates, Galen, Harvey and Boerhaave, and with retrospective diagnosis of diseases in the past on the basis of great literary masterpieces such as Thucydides’ account of the Athenian ‘plague’ or Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. In other words, it was inspired by a kind of teleological progressivism that pays particular attention to those aspects in which classical medicine still ‘speaks’ to us today.
(4) But times have changed. Postmodernism, pluralism, cultural relativism and comparativism, as in so many other areas, have had their impact also on the study of Greek medicine and science. Questions have been asked about the uniqueness of Greek medical thought, and it has been suggested that its debt to earlier, Near Eastern and Egyptian thinking may have been much greater than was commonly assumed. Questions have also been raised about the rationality of Greek medical thought, about the assumption that Greek medicine developed ‘from myth to reason’,2 and Greek medicine has been shown to have been much more open and receptive to superstition, folklore, religion and magic than was generally believed. (p. 3-4)
- A striking example is the vigorous debate initiated by R. Kapferer in the 1930s on the question whether the Hippocratic writers were familiar with the process of blood circulation; for a review of this debate see Duminil (1998) 169-74.[↩]
- For a more extended discussion of this development see the Introduction to Horstmanshoff and Stol (2004).[↩]