This volume, edited by Daniela Manetti, Lorenzo Perilli and Amneris Roselli stems from the 16th International Hippocratic Colloquium (Rome, October 2018), organized by the study centre ‘Forme del Sapere nel Mondo Antico’ (Rome University ‘Tor Vergata’). The quality and variety of the 22 papers included, summarized on pp. 535–45, and written in Italian, English, French or Spanish, are further proof of the vitality of Hippocratic studies, forty years after the first international colloquium of this kind.

In contrast to the enterprise of using the so-called Hippocratic Corpus for the understanding of Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, one of the ambitions of the colloquium was to highlight the need to use non-medical sources to illuminate ancient medicine, crystallized in the Hippocratic Corpus, in line with previous Hippocratic colloquia (2005; 2012).

The first two sections (‘Intorno al Corpus Hippocraticum: il contesto greco’ and ‘Intorno al Corpus Hippocraticum: il contesto mediterraneo’) widen the view on Hippocrates’ ‘others’ from the Greek to the Mediterranean context. The latter is represented by Babylonian society (Markham J. Geller), Egypt (Marie-Hélène Marganne) or by the exotic imaginary conveyed by the epithets attached to certain therapeutic substances (Florence Bourbon).

‘The others’ of Hippocrates in the first section refer to issues that are found in some of the Hippocratic writings but that are not limited to medical literature, such as the interest in cosmogony and anthropology (Stavros Kouloumentas) or the balance between exercise and diet (Amneris Roselli). These papers are in line with recent studies that aim to reintegrate certain Hippocratic treatises into a broader intellectual context than medical discourse alone (on On Regimen and pre-Socratic philosophy, see H. Bartoš, Philosophy and Dietetics in the Hippocratic On Regimen: A Delicate Balance of Health (Leiden 2015)). Thus, Paul Demont’s approach to the gynaecological corpus from the perspective of both religious and medical themes of fasting and dietary restrictions is an original contribution to the study of these writings. Elizabeth Craik’s approach of confronting dramatic and medical discourse is not new (see A. Guardasole, Tragedia e medicina nell’ Atene del V secolo a.C. (Naples 2000)) but it leads to an interesting reflection on the status of the parthenos (‘girl’), more social than biological, in addition to making a refreshing contribution to the thorny question of the strata of writing identified in the gynaecological corpus by choosing to call Author C, the author of the most recent stratum, ‘Costas’ (on these strata, see H. Grensemann, Knidische medizin, Teil I. Die Testimonien zur ältesten knidischen Lehre und Analyse knidischer Schriften im Corpus Hippocraticum (Berlin 1975); Knidische medizin, Teil II. Versuch einer weiteren Analyse der Schicht A in den pseudohippokratischen Schriften De natura muliebri und De muliebribus I und II (Stuttgart 1987))

The next two sections (‘Ippocrates: la sua immagine, la tradizione, la lingua and “Ippocratismi”’) move along the axis of time in order to measure the persistence of the image of ‘Hippocrates’. The latter crystallizes in the apocryphal corpus of the Letters (Robert J. Hankinson) or in the deontological and surgical treatise On the Physician (Giulia Ecca). The chapters written by Mathias Witt and Paul Potter focus on the ways in which the Corpus was written and transmitted. While Paul Potter discusses new witnesses in the manuscript tradition of On Diseases of Women I and II, which show the interest of some scholars after Galen, Mathias Witt makes an important contribution to the controversy around the epithet ‘Hippocratic’ applied to the Corpus. Against the thesis developed by Philip van der Eijk (‘On “Hippocratic” and “non-Hippocratic” Medical Writings’, in L. Dean-Jones and R.M. Rosen (eds), Ancient Concepts of the Hippocratic (Leiden 2016), 15–47) he retains the two criteria of philological coherence, by applying them to Aphorisms, Coan Prognoses and On Crises. Indeed, the study of medical vocabulary is an important field of Hippocratic studies, the terminological criterion having proven itself time and again (see J. Jouanna, ‘Place des Épidémies dans la Collection hippocratique: le critère de la terminologie’, in G. Baader and R. Winau (eds), Die hippokratischen Epidemien: Theorie-Praxis-Tradition (Stuttgart 1989), 60–87). The attention to the lexicon is present in the whole volume; it proves decisive on the question of the climate and the seasons which occupies Jacques Jouanna. It is above all at the heart of the texts written by Nathalie Rousseau and Ignacio Rodríguez Alfageme, who belong to this philological tradition and provide new information.

The ‘Hippocratisms’ of the last section particularly concern the Imperial period, from Galen to Aretaeus of Cappadocia. But the text written by Anna Maria Ieraci Bio takes us to the Renaissance, to the discovery of the humanist Giorgio Valla, who still exploits the medieval Hippocrates (see J. Jouanna, ‘Alle radici della melancolia: Ippocrate, Aristotele e l’altro Ippocrate’, in A. Garzya, A.V. Nazzaro and F. Tessitore (eds), I Venerdí delle Academie Napoletane (Naples 2006), 43–71). The Syriac and Arabic traditions, which have been the subject of recent studies (see A. Pietrobelli, ‘La tradition arabe du commentaire de Galien au Régime des maladies aiguës d’Hippocrate: mise au point et nouvelles perspectives’, in S. Fortuna, I. Garofalo, A. Lami and A. Roselli (eds), Sulla tradizione indiretta dei testi medici greci: i commenti (Pisa 2012), 101–22; P.E. Pormann (ed.) Epidemics in Context: Greek Commentaries on Hippocrates in the Arabic Tradition (Berlin 2012)) are also represented, with an alchemist Hippocrates presented by Matteo Martelli. The way in which Hippocrates’ name has been used with significant misunderstandings – some of which have been explored by Helen King for ‘the internet age’ (Hippocrates Now: ‘The Father of Medicine’ in the Internet Age (London 2020)) is thus one of the focuses of this section (Lutz Alexander Graumann on the treatment of clubfoot; Daniela Fausti on ‘Hippocratic’ pharmacology). The book includes several useful indices. The volume is an important contribution to Hippocratic studies, which will provide specialists and non-specialists alike with a necessary and stimulating update on many questions.