The transmission of medical knowledge to the Islamic world and the development of clinical medicine
Introduction
The Epidemics of Hippocrates (fl. 430 BCE) is a collection of case notes by different authors in seven books. The material was compiled in its present form much later, but some of it probably originated already in the fifth century BCE. The text constitutes a milestone in the history of clinical medicine. Galen (d. c. 216) wrote an extensive commentary on those parts he considered genuinely Hippocratic, i.e. books One, Two, Three and Six. This commentary is only partially and badly preserved in the original Greek. Almost all of book Two, and parts of books One and Six, solely survive in an Arabic translation by Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. c. 873).
The Warwick Epidemics project aims at editing and translating into English two books out of four of Galen's Commentary on Hippocrates' Epidemics: book One, for which large parts of the Greek original survive, and book Two, where no Greek is extant. The two books represent slightly more than the first third of Hunayn's Arabic translation and slightly less than two thirds of those parts lost in Greek. In addition, a textual analysis and comparison of book One with other translations will provide insights into the history of the Greek-Arabic translation movement and Hunayn's translation technique and terminology.
Project Team
The project team consists of two post-doctoral research assistants, Uwe Vagelpohl
and Bink Hallum, who work under the supervision of Peter E. Pormann and Simon Swain.
Further information
