Hippocrates

The treatises gathered under Hippocrates' name remain key evidence for how medicine was practiced in the ancient world and for how Greek thinkers understood the human body. This seventh volume of the Loeb Classical Library's edition of the Hippocratic Collection is translated by Wesley Smith, and it offers the first modern English rendering of Books 2 and 4 through 7 of the Epidemics. The first and third books of that work appear in Volume I. The title Epidemics originally meant something like 'visits,' and the seven books are casebooks and jottings in which physicians record patients they attended. Readers can follow these practitioners as they watch patients, note and weigh symptoms, judge which treatments work, and form theories about the body. The records seem to be physicians' notebooks drawn from several places around the Aegean. Smith's translation is accompanied by explanatory notes.