Narrative and Cultural History in the Hippocratic Treatise On Ancient Medicine

Autori

  • Marco Romani Mistretta

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13130/2037-2426/7399

Parole chiave:

Narrative and medicine, ancient Greece, Hippocrates, cultural history, progress

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ‘history of medicine’ outlined by the author of the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine, in order to reflect on the relationship between medicine and narrative in Classical Greece. At the outset of the work, the author provides an account of the beginnings of his discipline, conceiving of medicine’s history as a continuum of research and findings that unravel the nature of the human body and the cause of diseases. As this paper shows, the physician-narrator assigns to his craft a crucial role in fostering the birth and progress of human civilization. The rhetorical goals of the historical account are, as I argue, attained through a subtle narrative strategy. In fact, the narrator locates the origins of medicine within a teleological framework, marked by strong emphasis on the heuristic method that characterizes the past, the present, and the future of medical knowledge at once.

Riferimenti bibliografici

Bracht Barnham, Robert, ed. The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative. Groningen: Barkhuis, 2002. Print.

Cole, Thomas. Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology. Ann Arbor, MI: American Philological Association, 1967. Print.

Csapo, Eric and Margaret Miller. “Towards a Politics of Time and Narrative.” Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens. Ed. Deborah Boedeker and Kurt Raaflaub. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 87-126. Print.

D’Angour, Armand. The Greeks and the New. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print.

Dodds, Eric R. The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Print.

Dorati, Marco. Finestre sul futuro: fato, profezie e mondi possibili nel plot dell’Edipo Re di Sofocle. Pisa - Rome: Fabrizio Serra, 2015. Print.

Dunn, Francis. “Narrative, Responsibility, Realism.” The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative. Ed. Robert Bracht Barnham. Groningen: Barkhuis, 2005(b). 320-40. Print.

---. “On Ancient Medicine and its Intellectual Context.” Hippocrates in Context. Ed. Philip J. van der Eijk. Leiden: Brill, 2005(a). 49-67. Print.

---. Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Print.

Edelstein, Ludwig. The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Print.

Grethlein, Jonas and Antonios Rengakos, eds. Narratology and Interpretation. The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Print.

Guthrie, William K.C. In the Beginning: Some Greek Views on the Origins of Life and the Early State of Man. London: Greenwood Press, 1957. Print.

Heinimann, Felix. “Eine vorplatonische Theorie der techne.” Museum Helveticum 18 (1961): 105-30. Print.

Herter, Hans. “Die kulturhistorische Theorie der hippokratischen Schrift von der Alten Medizin.” Maia 15 (1963): 464-83. Print.

Holmes, Brooke. The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Print.

Jong, Irene J.F. de. A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.

Jong, Irene J.F. de, René Nünlist, and Agnus M. Bowie, eds. Narrators, narratees, and narratives in Ancient Greek Literature. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Print.

Jong, Irene J.F. de and René Nünlist, eds. Time in Ancient Greek Literature. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Print.

Jouanna, Jacques, ed. Hippocrate. De l’ancienne médecine. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1990. Print.

Lloyd, Geoffrey E.R. The Revolutions of Wisdom. Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Print.

Margolin, Uri. “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative.” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. David Herman. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003. 271-94. Print.

Miller, Harold W. “On Ancient Medicine and the Origin of Medicine.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 80 (1949): 187-202. Print.

---. “Technê and Discovery in On Ancient Medicine.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 86 (1955): 51-62. Print.

Purves, Alex C. Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.

Radt, Stefan L. “Zu ΠEPI APXAIHΣ IHTPIKHΣ.” Mnemosyne 32 (1979): 75-118. Print.

Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. (Temps et récit. Vol. 1. Paris: Seuil, 1983). Print.

Rosen, Ralph M. “Towards a Hippocratic Anthropology: On Ancient Medicine and the Origins of Humans.” Ancient Concepts of the Hippocratic. Papers Presented at the XIIIth International Hippocrates Colloquium. Austin, Texas, August 2008. Ed. Lesley Dean-Jones and Ralph M. Rosen. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Print.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative.” Style 43 (2009): 142-164. Print.

---. “Toward a definition of narrative.” Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Ed. David Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 22-35. Print.

Schiefsky, Mark J., ed. Hippocrates. On Ancient Medicine. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Print.

Sihvola, Juha. Decay, Progress, the Good Life? Hesiod and Protagoras on the Development of Culture. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1989. Print.

Surkamp, Carola. “Narratologie und Possible-Worlds Theory. Narrative Texte als alternative Welte.” Neue Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie. Ed. Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002. 153-183. Print.

White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 5-27. Print.

Pubblicato

29-12-2016

Come citare

Romani Mistretta, M. (2016). Narrative and Cultural History in the Hippocratic Treatise On Ancient Medicine. ENTHYMEMA, (16), 68–79. https://doi.org/10.13130/2037-2426/7399

Fascicolo

Sezione

Narrative and Medicine
Ricevuto 2016-07-27
Accettato 2016-12-22
Pubblicato 2016-12-29