Hi there. You're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast. Episode 96, Hellenistic Science, Medicine and the healing arts.

I swear by Apollo the healer, by Asclepius, by health, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out to the best

of my ability and judgment, this oath, and this covenant."

These are the beginning lines of the Hippocratic Oath, the earliest known rendition of what

many thousands of medical students recite each year across much of the modern world.

The influence of the ancient Greeks on the history of medicine cannot

be understated. And during the Hellenistic period, we see that several scientists and physicians

built upon the earlier work of those like Hippocrates in radical new ways. In the first

of several episodes on science during the Hellenistic age, we will discuss the ways that

medicine and the healing arts were studied, practiced, and advanced. While we are focusing on the

scientists working in the time between Alexander and the Roman Empire, there appears to

be almost no surviving texts dating to the Hellenistic period, outside of extensive

quotations and paraphrasing by later writers who synthesized the materials of their predecessors.

Some of the most important included Alus Cornelius Celts, who was a Roman author and encyclopedist living during the first century AD,

who wrote on a number of topics, but his work on medicine survives and is quite extensive.

But the most important heir to the Hellenistic tradition,

and perhaps the foremost physician and writer on medicine in the ancient world,

was Galen of Pergamon, who lived during the reign of the Antonian emperors in the late 2nd century AD.

His enormous corpus has to preserve much of our knowledge on Greco-Roman medicine after Hippocrates.

In fact, Galen has had more writings survived to the present day than any other Greek or Latin author.

Others like Soranus, Pliny the Elder, and Rufus of Ephesus provide us with additional snippets of information.

And I will also need to rely on the Hippocratic

...