Collection 05 · Open · also tagged religion · daily life · death
Medicine and the Body
The Hippocratic case histories, each one a paragraph: the patient, the street they lived on, the day, the symptom, the outcome. Most die. The plainness is the point, and it is the plainness that makes them hard to read.
Each case is already the size of a unit, which is rare. And On the Sacred Disease, the founding text of naturalistic explanation, takes about ten minutes to read.
What is in it
Each strip is the places that work names, in the order it names themHerodotus goes to Egypt and writes down everything: why the Nile floods, how a body is embalmed and what each grade of embalming costs, what the priests would and would not tell him, and a king-list running back ten thousand years. The founding document of curiosity about other people.
A doctor arriving in an unfamiliar town is told to study it before he studies anyone in it: which way it faces, which winds reach it, where its water comes from and whether it stands or runs. The oldest surviving argument that health is a property of places rather than of individuals — and then it turns outward and explains whole peoples by their weather.
In the second summer of the war a disease came to Athens and killed a large part of the population inside the walls. Thucydides caught it, survived, and wrote down the symptoms in order so that it could be recognised if it ever returned. Then he wrote down what it did to the way people behaved, which is the part nobody has been able to improve on.
The places are the one thing here with no machine judgement in them. Every count above is of Pleiades gazetteer records opened and checked by a person, and the map on each passage draws from the same records. Named is not the same as visited, and a place that could not be verified gets no dot rather than a guessed one — which is why some works with a great many place names in them show very few, and why a work with none shows nothing at all rather than an empty frame.
Still to come
Proposed, not present — none of this is on the site yetHippocrates Epidemics 1, 3 · Airs, Waters, Places · On Ancient Medicine · Aphorisms · The Oath · On the Sacred Disease · Galen Natural Faculties · Celsus De Medicina · Pliny NH 28–30 · Thucydides 2.47–54 · Lucretius 6.1138–1286 · Fronto · Epidaurus iamata