Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

30 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquitytheir ideas. I touch here on a further aspect in which the study of ancientmedicine – and philosophy – has recently been contextualised, and in thiscase the impetus has come from a third area of research we need to considerbriefly because of its particular relevance to the papers collected in thisvolume, namely the field of textual studies or, to use a more recent andspecific term,‘discourse analysis’.One only needs to point to the twenty-two volumes of Kühn’s editionof the works of Galen or the ten tomes of Littré’s edition of the works ofHippocrates to realise that ancient medical literature has been remarkablywell preserved, at least compared with many other areas of classical Greekand Latin literature. While much philological spade-work has been done tomake these texts more accessible, especially in projects such as the CorpusMedicorum Graecorum or the Collection des Universités de France, many partsof this vast corpus of literature, to which newly discovered texts continueto be added, still await further investigation.There still is, of course, a great basic demand for textual studies, editions,translations, commentaries and interpretative analyses – and in thisrespect, the triennial conferences on Greek and Latin medical texts haveproved remarkably fruitful. Yet apart from this, there is an increasing interestbeing taken in medical, scientific and philosophical texts, not justbecause of their intellectual contents but also from the point of view oflinguistics, literary studies, discourse analysis, narratology, ethnography ofliterature (orality and literacy), rhetoric and communication studies. Thisis related to a growing scholarly awareness of the communicative and competitivenature of Greek medicine and science. Greek doctors, philosophers,astronomers and mathematicians had to impress their audiences, to persuadethem of their competence and authority, to attract customers and toreassure them that they were much better off with them than with theirrivals. Medical, scientific and philosophical texts functioned in a specificsetting, with a particular audience and purpose, and served as vehicles notonly for the transmission of ideas but also for the assertion of power andauthority.These developments have given rise to a whole new field of studies andquestions regarding the ways in which knowledge was expressed and communicatedin the ancient world: the modes of verbal expression, technicalidioms, stylistic registers and literary genres that were available to peoplewho laid a claim to knowledge (healers, scientists, philosophers) in orderto convey their views to their fellows, colleagues and their wider audiences;the rhetorical strategies they employed in order to make their ideas intelligible,acceptable, or even fashionable; the circumstances in which they