Airs Waters Places

In this valuable treatise, Hippocrates suggested to the traveling physicians to look into the seasons of the year and their effects. He presented the health implications of the winds, the qualities of the waters, and each city's unique setting in the landscape. Hippocrates stated that "our natures are the physicians of our diseases" and supported that this movement for a natural cure should be encouraged.

Like the ancient medical text by Hippocrates that gives this book its title, Airs, Waters, Places looks with intensity and purpose at the elemental world to understand the possibility of an expanded notion of health in an often disconnected and disconnecting social order. In the poet's words, To call language a nervous system might be useful: if each sentient being is analogous to cells within the organism, language is analogous to the nerves as well as the messages sent along those nerves. There is, there, if not eternity, at least delusion. This is a book of various appetites in constant motion.

In this valuable treatise, Hippocrates suggested to the traveling physicians to look into the seasons of the year and their effects. He presented the health implications of the winds, the qualities of the waters, and each city's unique setting in the landscape. Hippocrates stated that "our natures are the physicians of our diseases" and supported that this movement for a natural cure should be encouraged.

In this valuable treatise, Hippocrates suggested to the traveling physicians to look into the seasons of the year and their effects. He presented the health implications of the winds, the qualities of the waters, and each city's unique setting in the landscape.

This work is a sampling of the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of ancient Greek medical works. At the beginning, and interspersed throughout, there are discussions on the philosophy of being a physician. There is a large section about how to treat limb fractures, and the section called The Nature of Man describes the physiological theories of the time. The book ends with a discussion of embryology and a brief anatomical description of the heart.

The aim of this book is to make Hippocrates' On Airs, Waters and Places and the Hippocratic Oath accessible to intermediate students of Ancient Greek. The running vocabulary and commentary are meant to provide everything necessary to read each page. Hippocrates' On Airs, Waters and Places is a great text for intermediate readers. The simple sentence structure makes it easy to read, while its subject matter, the impact of climate on disease and character, is interesting for a number of reasons. The presentation falls roughly into two halves, the first detailing various environmental factors that contribute to specific diseases, the second more ethnographic in its account of the differences between Asians and Europeans as a function of their environment and customs.

This volume makes available in English translation a selection of Jacques Jouanna's papers on Greek and Roman medicine, ranging from the early beginnings of Greek medicine to late antiquity.