Someone breaks a bone, runs a fever, has a tumor. In consequence, Lane Fox needs to trace the likelihood of a single physician’s perspective by drawing conclusions from the ordinariness of his long-forgotten patients’ lives. At the same time, there is no lost Tomb of Alexander to find in the dusty tomes of Alexandrian librarians, no single piece of evidence that clearly distinguishes the ‘Father of Medicine’ from the countless doctors of the Hippocratic School who borrowed his name. On the one hand, The Invention of Medicine is his attempt to recover the ‘real’ Hippocrates using elusive textual clues in the ancient case studies. The ancients tended to ascribe all manner of books “in the vein of” to important figures in a particular field, and as with The Illiad, The Odyssey, and other works attributed to ‘Homer,’ Hippocratic writings have uncertain provenance. Even the Hippocratic Corpus makes it hard to get a biographical sense of him. The medieval fabulist, Sir John Mandeville, made him King of Kos and gave him a daughter who turned into a magical dragon. Some said that he was descended on his mother’s side from Hercules. Like Alexander, he was the subject of conflicting descriptions and wild legends after his death. We know little for certain about Hippocrates, himself, other than the fact that he was born around 460 BC on Kos, an Aegean island that found itself in a tug-of-war between Greek and Persian civilizations.
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