Hippocrates
Airs, Waters, Places — how where you live decides what kills you
Περὶ ἀέρων, ὑδάτων, τόπων · Fifth century BCE, in the generation of the historians. The author is not Hippocrates himself in any provable sense; the name covers a school.
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.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Francis Adams (1796-1861) was a Scottish country doctor in Banchory who taught himself Greek well enough to produce the standard Victorian Hippocrates, and both halves of that show. His English is a physician's: he reaches for the clinical term where a literary translator would soften, and he is unembarrassed by the anatomical detail. It is also Victorian and a little stately, with a fondness for 'the which' and for long periodic sentences that the Greek does not have — the Greek of this treatise is famously plain and paratactic, a series of short declarations, and Adams smooths it into something more flowing than it is. Where he is most useful is on technical vocabulary, because he knew what the diseases were.