The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates

Format: Hardcover Language: English ISBN: 0465093442 ISBN13: 9780465093441 Release Date: December 2020 Publisher: Basic Books Length: 432 Pages Weight: 1.55 lbs. Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.7" x 9.3" A preeminent classics scholar revises the history of medicine.Medical thinking and observation were radically changed by the ancient Greeks, one of their great legacies to the world. In the fifth century BCE, a Greek doctor put forward his clinical observations of individual men, women, and children in a collection of case histories known as the Epidemics. Among his working principles was the famous maxim "Do no harm." In The Invention of Medicine, acclaimed historian Robin Lane Fox puts these remarkable works in a wider context and upends our understanding of medical history by establishing that they were written much earlier than previously thought. Lane Fox endorses the ancient Greeks' view that their texts' author, not named, was none other than the father of medicine, t