MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

30 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity

their ideas. I touch here on a further aspect in which the study of ancient

medicine – and philosophy – has recently been contextualised, and in this

case the impetus has come from a third area of research we need to consider

briefly because of its particular relevance to the papers collected in this

volume, namely the field of textual studies or, to use a more recent and

specific term,‘discourse analysis’.

One only needs to point to the twenty-two volumes of Kuhn’s edition ̈

of the works of Galen or the ten tomes of Littr ́e’s edition of the works of

Hippocrates to realise that ancient medical literature has been remarkably

well preserved, at least compared with many other areas of classical Greek

and Latin literature. While much philological spade-work has been done to

make these texts more accessible, especially in projects such as theCorpus

Medicorum Graecorumor theCollection des Universit ́es de France, many parts

of this vast corpus of literature, to which newly discovered texts continue

to be added, still await further investigation.

There still is, of course, a great basic demand for textual studies, edi-

tions, translations, commentaries and interpretative analyses – and in this

respect, the triennial conferences on Greek and Latin medical texts have

proved remarkably fruitful. Yet apart from this, there is an increasing in-

terest being taken in medical, scientific and philosophical texts, not just

because of their intellectual contents but also from the point of view of

linguistics, literary studies, discourse analysis, narratology, ethnography of

literature (orality and literacy), rhetoric and communication studies. This

is related to a growing scholarly awareness of the communicative and com-

petitive nature of Greek medicine and science. Greek doctors, philosophers,

astronomers and mathematicians had to impress their audiences, to per-

suade them of their competence and authority, to attract customers and to

reassure them that they were much better off with them than with their

rivals. Medical, scientific and philosophical texts functioned in a specific

setting, with a particular audience and purpose, and served as vehicles not

only for the transmission of ideas but also for the assertion of power and

authority.

These developments have given rise to a whole new field of studies and

questions regarding the ways in which knowledge was expressed and com-

municated in the ancient world: the modes of verbal expression, technical

idioms, stylistic registers and literary genres that were available to people

who laid a claim to knowledge (healers, scientists, philosophers) in order

to convey their views to their fellows, colleagues and their wider audiences;

the rhetorical strategies they employed in order to make their ideas intel-

ligible, acceptable, or even fashionable; the circumstances in which they