Ordering Information in Greco-Roman Medicine

P.Oxy. 80.5231 (editio princeps 2014), a lemmatic commentary on Hippocrates Epidemics I of two columns dating to the first or second century CE and written on the back of a Greek/Latin glossary, is a substantial addition to our knowledge of ancient medical Empiricism. In the first column, after the final quotation of the Hippocratic case (2.684.10-688.8 L), the papyrus preserves the polemic of an unnamed author against Asclepiades of Bithynia, followed by the lemmatic commentary, of which the half lines of the second column preserve initial remarks.

The practical application of medical knowledge is inflected by several challenges, two of which are especially significant. First, the practitioner must rely upon and interpret the subjective experience of a patient who is (in most cases) unfamiliar with medical theory and practice; in other words, there is a gap between the one who possesses knowledge (the physician) and the body of the one suffering (the patient). Second, medical knowledge frequently needs to be used in a range of diverse and urgent settings, such as childbirth, acute illness, or battle.

In this paper I will bring to the fore a fascinating yet virtually unknown testimony to the panel’s approach of “ordering information in Greco-Roman Medicine”: the anonymous Carmen de viribus herbarum (fr. 64 in Heitsch’s Griechische Dichterfragmente der römische Kaiserzeit = GDRK).

In ancient as in modern medicine, we frequently encounter a tension between quantitative and qualitative methods of ordering information. On the one hand, many physicians, from the Hippocratics onward, consider mathematical technai, like geometry and astronomy, to be models of the kind of “exactitude” (akribeia) to which they themselves aspire. To these physicians, mathematics offers the tantalizing possibility of describing, predicting, and thereby controlling patient outcomes with both precision and accuracy.

The Liber Medicinalis of Quintus Serenus, a late didactic poem of 1107 lines in the Plinian medical tradition, has received little attention despite recent interest in ancient didactic poetry. I propose that the central problem for Quintus is not so much the familiar contrast of technical content and poetic form, but rather one of competing modes of structuring a text: the Liber Medicinalis is torn between the pragmatic drive to divide and compartmentalise medical knowledge for convenient reference and the aesthetic demands of composing unified hexameter epos.