Longlisted for the RUNCIMAN AWARD 2021 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. This original and compelling book opens windows onto many other aspects
of the classical world from women's medicine to street-life empire art sport sex and even
botany. It fills a dark decade in a new way and carries readers along an extraordinary journey
form Homer's epics to the grateful heirs of the Greek case histories first in the Islamic
world and then in early modern Europe.
