Epic Medicine: The Itinerate Physician as Bard in Classical Greece

Tyson Sukava (University of Delaware)

Examining the collection of classical Greek medical writings in seven “books” called the
Epidemics or ‘Community Visits’, I argue that the (now anonymous) authors created dramatic
vignettes across their wanderings in which they were self-cast as either heroes or omniscient
bards within a community. It emerges that the success of individual treatises was partly tied to
how the physician positioned himself in the narrative, thus shedding further light on the
relationship between form and content in Greek technical treatises.

The drama of medicine has had a long history of inspiring literature and theatre (Garner 2023). A physician, in collaboration with the patient, attempts to direct the body from medical danger to safety. Greek medical writers assisted in developing this narrative (Cross 2017). Some were itinerate, encountering a range of people, environments, and illnesses while plying their craft (Wee 2016, Chang 2005). Accounts of their experiences took the form of both patient case histories and discursive medical notes, each of which can be read as an Odyssean epyllion of sorts, set within the grand drama of life and death.

There is, however, a formal unevenness between these books, ranging from loose collections of notes as private aide-memoires to more structured narratives digestible for wider consumption. Seemingly unedited treatises became maligned in antiquity for being derivative. Extending Holmes’ work (2013), I propose there is a secondary element which made those “unedited” texts less appealing: the degree to which the physician inserts himself through first-person asides. In contrast, echoing structures from Iliad battle passages, authors of higher-praised works offered more satisfying literary memorials with little self-reference. Here, otherwise unknown patients-as-heroes faced the antagonist disease with little success, while the omniscient doctor-narrator maintained the distant control of an auteur director of pathological research.

Bibliography:
Chang, H.-H. 2005. “The Cities of the Hippocratic Doctor” in Hippocrates in Context. Brill.
Cross, J. 2017. Hippocratic Oratory: The Poetics of Early Greek Medical Prose. Routledge.
Garner, S.B. 2023. Theatre and Medicine. Bloomsbury.
Holmes, B. 2013. “In Strange Lands: Disembodied Authority and the Role of the Physician in the Hippocratic Corpus and Beyond” in Writing Science: Medical and Mathematical Authorship in Ancient Greece. De Gruyter.
Wee, J.Z. 2016. “Case History as Minority Report in the Hippocratic Epidemics” in Homo Patiens: Approaches to the Patient in the Ancient World. Brill.