32 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity
the situation in which a text has, or is supposed to have, functioned, for
example the audience for whom it is intended (as distinct from the audi-
ence by whom it has actually been received), the conditions in which it has
been produced, ‘published’ and performed, the medium in which it has
been transmitted, and so on. Here, again, discourse studies and ethnogra-
phy of literature have provided useful instruments of research, for example
D. Hymes’ analysis of the ‘speech event’ into a number of components that
can, not without some irony, be listed according to the initial letters of the
wordspeaking:
setting(time, place, and other circumstances),
scene(e.g. didactic, general or specialised audience, informal communi-
cation or festive occasion),
participants(speaker/writer, hearer/reader, addressee),
ends(objective of communication, e.g. conveying information, persua-
sion, entertainment),
act sequences(style, linguistic structure of the speech act),
keys(tone of communication, e.g. ironic, emotional),
instrumentalities(medium of communication: oral/written, letter/fax/
e-mail, illustrations, dialect, technical language),
norms(stylistic, social, scholarly),
genres.^35
Though not all of these components are equally relevant in each particular
case, models like this do provide a heuristic framework which may be helpful
to the understanding of the actual linguistic form ofanytext, including sci-
entific texts. A recent German collection of articles on ‘Wissensvermittlung’
(‘transmission of knowledge’) in the ancient world gives an impression
of the kind of questions and answers envisaged from such an integrated
approach.^36 Thus a number of syntactic peculiarities of texts like some of
the ‘case histories’ of patients in the HippocraticEpidemicsmight better be
accounted for on the assumption that they represent private notes made
by doctors for their own use; but further refinement of such an explana-
tion comes within reach when stylistic variationswithintheEpidemicsare
related to a development in scientific writing towards greater audience-
orientedness.
At this point, a most fortunate connection can be perceived between
linguistically inspired approaches within classical philology and the recent
surge of a ‘contextual’ approach in the history of science, whereby the text
is seen as an instrument for scientists and practising doctors to use to define
(^35) Hymes ( 1972 ) 58 ff. (^36) Kullmann and Althoff ( 1993 ).