There are many different ways of investigating medicine’s past. One, which has been practised with great success by Françoise Skoda, the honorand of this volume, and her pupils in Nice, Poitiers and, for many years, Paris, has been the careful teasing out of the meanings of the words used by professionals and lay alike to describe all aspects of medicine. Skoda’s 1988 book on the metaphors used by the ancient Greeks to describe the body in sickness and in health was a model investigation, extending with great subtlety and learning the older etymological investigations into the medical vocabulary. This close attention to the nuances of language has been a feature of what might be termed the French school (although the authors in this volume come also from Spain and Italy) and requires a greater exposure to ancient language and literature than can be gained from simple word searches with a computer, useful though these are.
The volume is divided into six sections, beginning with etymology: how words are formed when describing new plants or substances or even physical characteristics of particular individuals. A shorter section deals with metaphors: the lips of a wound and the thorax and its related words. The next two sections are both the longest and have perhaps the greatest relevance to historians of medicine. The first looks at the meaning and development of technical terms, from the Hippocratic Corpus through to Galen and some medical papyri. It considers medical instruments and philosophical terms as well as types of drugs, stressing also the fluidity of meaning even from a single author. Some of these words develop new senses within Galen’s medicine; others, like ‘soft’, require being put into a broad context if we wish to discover what an ancient doctor saw from the description that was given. Often, as in section IV, the problem of interpretation involves an author’s choice of terms: Galen’s words to describe different ages from childhood almost to the grave say much about his method of classification as well as his independence. Alternatively, two words for the same thing may be found in somewhat different contexts. Latin, for example, has two words for the palm of the hand: ‘palma’ and ‘vola’. The former is found very widely in a variety of authors, both secular and religious, whereas the latter is almost exclusively technical (and means also the sole of the foot).
The final sections move away from ancient medicine narrowly defined. Section V examines the use of medical words in non-medical contexts: in the plays of Aristophanes, in a Greek epigram, by the historian Polybius and in the retelling of the myth of Hercules and the Lernaean hydra. They show how far medical terms had penetrated into a wider vocabulary, a further example of the fluidity of the Greek medical world. The last three essays extend the chronological scope of the volume, looking at the translation of terms from Greek into Arabic and medieval Latin, the words used to describe a pregnant woman in various European languages (with English the most prolific and, certainly compared with French, the sloppiest) and the adoption into French and English of medical adjectives ending in -iac/-iaque (eg., insomniac/-aque). Some of them, mostly rare and technical, have their origin in Latin (and often derive from the Greek), but others, such as paranoiac/-aque, have no direct classical source but developed in both languages at the end of the nineteenth century as part of an explosion of new ideas about the body and disease.
This is a volume of high, if at times austere, scholarship. Anyone interested in Greek and Latin will need to consult it and will derive much benefit from it. It is a worthy tribute to Skoda, showing not only the quality of the teaching she has imparted to many of the authors but also the affection that she has inspired in all those who have met her.
