Abstract
This is the second in a series of volumes providing the first Czech commented translations of the most important and influential texts of the Hippocratic collection, accompanied with introductory essays reflecting recent scholarship in the field. The first volume opened with an extensive introductory study of the history of ancient medicine by S.
Fischerová, followed by treatises embracing the deontological dimension of Hippocratic medicine, namely the Hippocratic Oath (Jusjurandum), Decorum (De decente habitu) and Physician (De medico), and concluded with texts featuring the doctrinal, methodological and epistemological diversity of the Corpus as represented by Ancient Medicine (De prisca medicina), The Art (De arte), and the first book of Regimen (De victu, I). In the second volume we introduce five texts attesting to some of the most important and remarkable Hippocratic doctrines and methods.
We start with On the Nature of Man (De natura hominis), the only Hippocratic text vindicating blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile as the main bodily humours, a version of the four humours theory which gained fame in the following centuries as the original Hippocratic theory and which - by means of its various modifications and transformations, such as the theory of four temperaments (i.e. sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic) - had a remarkable impact on European as well as Hebrew and Arabic medicine and culture. It is followed by On the Sacred Disease (De morbo sacro), the first monograph on epilepsy in the history of medicine, the author of which refuses the allegedly divine origin of the disease, attacks all priests and magical healers of the disease as impious charlatans, and searches for its rational explanation.
The next treatise, On Airs, Waters, and Places (De aere, aquis et locis), is the founding text of the "climatic" (or "meteorological") medicine which influenced in a substantial way European thought about health and environment since the Renaissance, in particular in the period of the Enlightenment. The first book of Epidemics (Epidemiae), our fourth Hippocratic text, documents the experience of an itinerant physician traveling to Thasos and other places who carefully wrote down individual case histories as well as observations concerning seasonal and weather changes and their impact on the health of whole populations.
Finally, the most elaborated ancient account of the diagnostic interpretation of dreams, namely the fourth book of Regimen (De victu), closes the second volume, which is further supplemented with short annotations of all texts collected in Littré's edition, including references to modern critical editions, translations and commentaries. This publication is the result of a four-year grant project "Corpus Hippocraticum in the Light of Modern Human Sciences" (401-09-0767), supported by the Czech Science Foundation.