Hippocrates transformed: crafting a Hippocratic discourse of medical semiotics in English, 1850\u20131930

Kamran I Karimullah

doi:10.1057/s41599-020-0511-7

Abstract

This study presents a methodology for adapting corpus linguistics to the genealogical analysis of translation’s role in the evolution of medical concepts. This methodology is exhibited by means of a case study that draws on a number of corpora to explore how two English translators—Francis Adams, a Scottish physician, and Williams H.S. Jones, a Cambridge philologist, classicist and ancient historian—translated a set of terms in Hippocratic medical texts that refer to how the body reveals illness. Drawing on the Genealogies of Knowledge subcorpora of ancient Greek and modern English, it examines some of the ways in which translation contributes to the creation of a Hippocratic semiotic discourse in English whose lexical features differ from those attested to in the subcorpus of Greek Hippocratic texts. A comparative analysis of keyword frequency and collocations of Greek semiotic terms such as sēmeion, and English terms such as sign and symptom reveals the different translation strategies Jones and Adams used to translate the text. The result of this process is a Hippocratic semiotic discourse in English whose lexical features do not reflect those in the Hippocratic texts in a straightforward way.

Highlights

Hippocrates (c. 460 BCE–c. 375 BCE) was an ancient Greek physician who is traditionally regarded as the father of Western medicine
Focusing on Francis Adams’ and William Jones’ Hippocrates translations, I have illustrated how combining a number of historical Greek and English corpora allows us to understand how a Hippocratic semiotic discourse emerged in English in the 19th and early 20th centuries
We have seen that, owing to the shrinking terminological options available to them since at least the middle of the 19th century, both translators interpreted the source-text in ways that took for granted the centrality of a Hippocratic semiotic theory in the source-text, and that sign and symptom were the most suitable terms to convey Hippocrates’ semiotic discussions to English-speaking audiences

Summary

Introduction

Hippocrates (c. 460 BCE–c. 375 BCE) was an ancient Greek physician who is traditionally regarded as the father of Western medicine. 375 BCE) was an ancient Greek physician who is traditionally regarded as the father of Western medicine Despite this reputation, it has long been recognised that the 60-odd medical texts that together make up what is typically referred to as the ‘Hippocratic corpus’ could not have been written by a single individual in the 5th or 4th century BCE. Significant variations in writing style, subject matter and date of composition suggest that these texts were the output of a group of writers (Jouanna, 1999) This set of texts presents a number of concepts, attitudes, practices, and terms that, while not always coherent in themselves, were gradually synthesised by notable physicians such as Galen of Pergamum Even as medical research and clinical methods rapidly developed in Europe and the United States in the 19th century, the pioneering French medical researcher Claude Bernard (1813–1879) sought to trace the genealogy of his physiological theory of what was later called ‘homoeostasis’ to “the healing power of nature” which Bernard purports was described by Hippocrates more than two millennia earlier (cited in Porter, 1997, p. 340)

Objectives

Conclusion