Medical practice in classical Greece : The neurological and psychiatric case reports of the Hippocratic Corpus

Abstract

Which theoretical and practical competences do the neurological and psychiatric case histories of the Hippocratic Corpus convey? The 431 Hippocratic case histories have been studied for reports and communication on the diagnostics, treatment and prognosis of single persons and groups of patients suffering from neurological and psychiatric diseases. In the 7books of the Hippocratic Epidemics, atotal of 128 patients with neurological and psychiatric symptoms are described. Epidemic fever and its variants were the leading predisposing conditions and the main symptoms were delirium, coma, insomnia, headache, speech disorders and convulsions. Anumber of patients with phrenitis and opisthotonos are also reported. The majority of the sick persons were male, were teenagers or adults and 47of them are mentioned by name. The patient's information about the course is often just as informative as the doctor's observations. Treatment was limited to physical and dietary measures. The Hippocratic physician diagnosed and attempted to treat alarge number of neurological and psychiatric diseases. The often almost continuous observations of the patients led to astonishingly precise predictions of the course and the prospects of recovery. Numerous symptoms described in the case studies, including carphologia and opisthotonus, have entered the neurological vocabulary. The retrospective etiological analysis of the reports leads to the almost explicit identification of neurosyphilis and encephalitis lethargica. The therapeutic measures described by the author were, as the changeable course of the diseases shows, only of limited effectiveness despite a very differentiated application over time, both against the underlying diseases and the neurological and psychiatric complications.