Price | RM145.00 |
Product SKU | 9780241277058 |
Brand | Penguin |
Points Needed | 29000 |
Availability | Out Of Stock |
The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates - hardcover
Author: Robin Lane Fox
ISBN: 9780241277058
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 403
Weight: 690 g
Medicine is one of the ancient Greek's great fields of achievement. In the fifth century BC, they even wrote of it as a craft they had invented. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, is celebrated worldwide and the Hippocratic Oath is admired throughout the medical professions as a founding statement of ethics and ideals.
Robin Lane Fox's remarkable book puts the invention of medicine in a wider perspective, from the epic poems of Homer to the first doctors known to have been active in the Greek world. He examines what we do and do not know about Hippocrates and his Oath and the many writings that survive under his name. He then focuses on particular doctor's case histories of named individuals, and their island setting, bringing them to life at a time far earlier than previously recognized. This new context has important consequences for the medical knowledge shown by the Greek dramatists, especially Euripides and Aeschylus, and the founding historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Lane Fox brilliantly pieces together the doctor's thinking and relates it in a new way to the history of Greek prose and ideas.
This original and compelling book opens windows onto many other aspects of the classical world, from women's medicine to street-life, empire, art, sport, sex and even botany. It carries readers along an extraordinary journey from Homer's epics to the Greek case histories and their impact, first in the Islamic world and then in early modern Europe.