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Ancient Greek medicine today

Ancient Greek Medicine Today

Ancient Greek medicine is traditionally credited with a foundational role in the making of modern medicine probably best concretized these days by the oath that freshly graduated physicians take in many medical schools across the globe. This oath is the Hippocratic Oath, written almost 25 centuries ago, which expressed in a simple, yet unambiguous way the principles that should guide a life in the medical profession, whatever the time, the place, and the circumstances.

Looking beyond the Oath, knowledge of ancient Greek medicine is partial. Many works of vital importance contained in ancient manuscripts are still unknown. Besides copies of the works by the canonical authors, these manuscripts—mostly from the 9th-10th to the 16th century and Byzantine for almost all—contain a great many works and writings of all types on a broad range of medical questions, problems, and aspects of the management of life, disease and health that attest to a keen interest, a deep knowledge and, at the same time, a remarkable ability to manage life with an impressive resilience in constantly changing circumstances during the two millennia from Hippocrates’ time to the capture of Constantinople in 1453.

As the Census of Greek Medical Manuscripts published in 2016 has revealed, these manuscripts are twice as many as previously thought: over 2,500 instead of the ca. 1,300 listed in the catalog that has been the reference for the whole 20th century and until recently, the so-called “Diels”, named after its editor, German philologist and historian of ancient science Herman Diels. The platform MediManus provides access to the available digital version of this whole wealth of original manuscripts. It not only opens the doors of libraries to readers across the world, but also—and more importantly—it provides the necessary environment to make the unique sum of knowledge contained in these manuscripts accessible to scholars, scientists and non-specialists. Going beyond accessibility, MediManus offers original scientific information, certainly about the manuscripts, but also about the works that they contain, which have been the backbone of medicine through the centuries from ancient Greece to not so long ago.

MediManus aims to develop awareness about the significance of ancient Greek medicine in the 21st century, foster renewed and original scientific research, open the field onto new horizons in a cross-disciplinary perspective, and provide tools for research and teaching. It is a laboratory for a new approach to ancient Greek medicine.

A publication of the Center for Hellenic Studies, MediManus builds on three resources: the medical legacy of ancient Greece, the scholarly and classical tradition of the previous centuries, and the most recent and constantly evolving information technologies and image processing. Our aim is to bring to light and contribute to a better understanding of the ancient Greek medical works, whether known for a long time or still to be discovered in manuscripts preserved in libraries all over the world. The platform will progressively include all the presently known Greek medical manuscripts and will as well provide relevant peer-reviewed publications based on advanced research, both about the manuscripts and the medical works.

Iteration or Creation?

The many identified copies of ancient works and the developments they have inspired over the centuries have been traditionally disregarded or overlooked, seemingly because they contributed to a considerable degree of iteration and redundancy. It is common practice in scholarly research to ignore these iterative elements in favor of concentrating on the original form of the texts and the earliest analysis of the scientific questions under consideration. This focus is predicated on the belief that the repeated copies of ancient texts have led to gradual transformations—indeed, alterations—of the original content and essence of ancient heritage.

This practice is reflected in the critical editing of ancient texts, a philological discipline considered as the most accomplished endeavour of classical studies. Copies are disregarded to limit the number of manuscripts to be considered in the editing process. Editing concentrates on only one or very few manuscripts believed to have more accurately transmitted the work to be edited. The history of ancient science proceeded in a comparable manner. It searched for the origins of later developments and emphasized the classical corpus instead of the subsequent works often viewed as reductive and characterized by simplification and erosion of information. Errors introduced through successive copies are supposed to have increased textual and scientific loss.

In recent decades, textual history has notably transitioned from production to reception of literature, fictional, scientific, or other. This shift has opened new perspectives on transformations. Within a corpus formed by the reproduction of a text in multiple copies, transformations reflect interventions ranging from minor adjustments to more substantial modifications. They are now viewed as attempts to reappropriate a work or subject matter, facilitate their integration into changing contexts or update their content, all while eliminating the inevitable noise generated by the errors unavoidably stemming from manual transcription, potential misinterpretations or any factor influencing the reproduction or understanding of received information.

This transition from production to reception transforms the understanding of the multiple copies of the same work that were considered at best as the transmitters of the ancient legacy in a perspective that has been prevalent until relatively recently. Copies are no longer seen as passive repetition, but may result from an intellectual engagement performed in se and per se that escaped in earlier studies. The concept of transmission acquires a new meaning and becomes tradition.

This shift coincided with a significant evolution in the study of ancient manuscripts, which emerged as a discipline in itself known as Codicology. The study of manuscripts is no longer an ancillary technique for textual criticism that provided evidence to justify neglect of copies based only on rigorous philological analysis. By examining book-making in all its components, codicology has the potential to determine not only the year or period of the manuscripts and, ideally, also the place of their production, but also to identify the milieu where manuscripts were created, be it a library, a study center, a scriptorium (center of copy) or, in the case of medicine, a hospital, as well as the conditions of all kinds, not only cultural, but also social, economic and political, under which codices were produced. Codicology can also bring to light elements that suggest the intended use(s) of manuscripts, whether for learning or study, personal notes, or clinical research and practice in the case of medicine.

During the same period, the study of writing—Paleography—also went through substantial revision and affirmed more explicitly the status of the written word and the very act of writing as objects of historical inquiry in its own right. Its results complement codicological data. Identification of the types of writing used by copyists may reveal the social and economic conditions in which books were produced and also hint at possible commissions and use(s) of the books, from preservation of the ancient legacy and assembling a library to individual reading, study and even active teaching and research.

From Tradition to Medicine in the Making

Rather than eliminating the several copies of the same works or concentrating on the classics, MediManus builds a comprehensive collection of ancient Greek medical literature with both reproductions and innovations. Thanks to codicological and paleographical, as well as historical analysis, it provides data to follow as closely as possible the diffusion of the ancient legacy, trace its impact and discover the new developments it generated.

Transitioning from the books and their texts and going beyond the iteration and redundancy apparently produced by the copies of identical works and new works, the variations in their texts constitute an unparalleled source of information. They no longer can be automatically dismissed as degradations, as was the norm in classical scholarship until recently; instead, they warrant examination as significant data in their own right, arising from the adaptation(s) of texts to diverse contexts, whether natural, human, or scientific.

The best illustration of this is provided by the drugs in therapeutic prescriptions. Variations from those in the original texts may reflect the circumstances characteristic of the location where the manuscripts were produced. Such circumstances could include the natural environment, the accessibility of the materia medica, or the assessment of their effectiveness. A thorough codicological and paleographical examination of the manuscripts where such drugs are mentioned may reveal the period and location of the manuscript’s copying, thereby enabling us to identify the place and time (each independently or both in combination) where the drugs listed in the manuscripts were available and prescribed.

Comparative investigations in the extensive collection formed by compiling all versions of Greek medical texts, whether canonical, later or anonymous, will uncover overarching trends in both textual and medical history. Tradition was not merely repetition but also reappropriation, recontextualization, updating, and efforts to forge a new scientific canon. Texts composed a millennium ago, despite their significant impact and enduring inspiration, required modifications—linguistic adjustments and likely scientific updates. Beyond mere modernization to resonate with contemporary milieux, these modifications resulted in substantial revision and editing in the truest sense of the term. They may have led to integration of new information from current scientific advancements and synthesis of new forms of texts that aligned more closely with the scientific understanding, resources, and requirements of their respective places and time.

Together with the numerous short or more developed notes found within the manuscripts that resulted from clinical practice in the field, the editorial work on texts, damaged and in need of restoration or not, attests to an intellectual and scientific activity that has not been properly identified in previous studies. This lack of recognition results from cascading limitations: the traditional framework of classical scholarship prevented from considering significant texts, notes and interventions in manuscripts, and this state of research was reflected in new bibliography, which, in turn, becomes the reference for new research, resulting in an impasse.

Such an approach inherently raises the question of the scope and limits of ancient Greek medicine, which is understood here in the meaning it had in the several epochs covered by preserved Greek texts and manuscripts. Medicine encompassed a diverse array of disciplines and aspects, including genuine anatomical and physiological studies and descriptions, authentic psychological evaluations and insights, as well as superstitions, invocations, and methods for divining the future, scrutinizing the outcomes of ailments and possibly offering solace in the face of uncertainty.

A New Library of Alexandria?

The comprehensive nature of the virtual collection assembled on the platform MediManus may evoke the extensive library collections of antiquity, most notably exemplified by the Library of Alexandria. In fact, due to the advancements in digital and imaging technology that facilitate the virtual assembly of manuscripts preserved in libraries worldwide, the virtual library of manuscripts of MediManus can be regarded as a third-millennium incarnation of the Library of Alexandria for ancient Greek medical manuscripts and texts.

Nevertheless the comparison of MediManus to the Library of Alexandria would be incomplete if it referred only to its intended comprehensiveness. The Library of Alexandria was more than just a collection of rolls gathered from all the Greek world of that time. It was also—if not above all—a meticulously organized repository thanks to the efforts of its erudite chief librarians. With their many amanuenses the Alexandrian librarians carefully identified all texts and verified authorship, grouped all the works by the same author or works with identical or similar topics in coherent corpora, compiled alphabetical author indexes, and developed analytical tables of topics. These and many other research instruments allowed scientists and scholars studying at the Library not only to locate the items they were interested in in the vast collection of the Library, but to also discover works previously unknown to them on the topics they were studying.

In a similar fashion, MediManus provides exact information about the current location and identification of the manuscripts, together with documentary information. In its first phase, all entries—be they about items digitized or not—include the date or period of the manuscripts, a short, yet exact identification of the medical texts they contain, and a reference to available standard catalogues.

The Library of Alexandria served not merely as a repository of knowledge, regardless of the significance and meticulous organization of its collections. It functioned as a reference for research in text transmission, analysis, editing, and scientific inquiry. In a comparable yet more specialized manner, MediManus acts as an essential resource for the exploration of ancient Greek medicine through manuscripts and their texts, integrating suitable computer-assisted research methodologies and approaches that transcend conventionally defined academic disciplines, bridging their divides and amalgamating various disciplines as required.

The digital form of the library—particularly thanks to the IIIF format—opens new horizons that blur both spatial and temporal boundaries and can even dissolve the physical reality and tangible existence of digitized objects. While traditional printed and digital texts and images have made it possible to assemble extensive documentary collections, make comparative analysis, and produce significant insights, they lacked the capacity for interaction with the objects they represent, a capability that the IIIF format provides. Manuscript images in IIIF format can be annotated, altered, and manipulated ad libitum, fostering a dialogue with historical documents that was previously unattainable, thereby allowing contemporary users to engage with these artifacts in a manner that bridges space and time through a unique, physical interaction. Texts can be dissected into individual letters for comparison, measurement, and overlaying, which aids in the authentication of writings and the reconstruction of ancient book production based on solid evidence. A page can be annotated and transformed into a para- or hypertext, reintegrating original textual information into its contemporary scholarly and scientific context, effectively transforming a page into a micro-library and enhancing the understanding of knowledge genesis beyond the capabilities of any other comparative approach.

Digital practice, as suggested in the preceding lines and perhaps more accurately termed digital thinking, along with a documentary collection such as the one assembled in MediManus and suitable computer-assisted research methodologies, serve as tools for the iMouseion virtual research laboratory dedicated to exploring ancient Greek medicine. This approach is anticipated to significantly transform contemporary historiography and potentially benefit medicine by bringing to light the experiences documented in the historical manuscripts and texts collected in MediManus. The convergence of space and time and the synergy of relevant scientific disciplines has the potential to revitalize the study of ancient Greek medicine and generate renewed medical research treasuring the ancient Greek legacy.