by Helen King (Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Open University)

Classical reception still tends to ignore the technical literatures of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Maybe there’s a sense that maths, astronomy, science, or medicine somehow lie outside the world of reception, being more about a steady progress towards ‘rightness’? Such an approach would be a mistake, certainly in the world of medicine, where rather less than we may hope is currently certain. In another life, I was an examiner for an intercalated BSc in History of Medicine, taken by those otherwise training for medicine. Most years, there was someone who dropped out from the medical degree once they’d studied the history of the subject, exposure to other medical beliefs leading to a loss of confidence in whether they could trust what they were currently learning about the body.

I’m about to publish a book in the Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception series, Hippocrates Now. There, I’ve noted that Hippocrates’ role in medicine remains exceptional, not just because other professions don’t identify so strongly with a founder figure, but because both orthodox and other forms of medicine continue to claim him as their own. It’s not that orthodox medicine has him right and alternatives are riffing on this; there is no ‘right’ version. In the book, I’ve looked at how Hippocrates plays out beyond professional readers, focusing on Wikipedia, social media, memes and news stories. Obviously all the images of him, like this ‘true portrayal’ complete with books, surgical tools and a herb, are entirely imaginary, but so too are the stories that are told, and I analyse in detail the development of a story that originated on Wikipedia in 2010 where Hippocrates was imprisoned for twenty years and used the time to write a treatise called The Complicated Body. Because a man like that wouldn’t waste time, would he?

Portrait of Hippocrates from Johannes Antonides van der Linden, Magni Hippocratis Coi opera omnia (Leiden: Gaasbeeck, 1663), frontispiece
Hippocrates (1663). Courtesy of Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

Studies of popular Hippocratic receptions go back to David Cantor’s introduction to his edited collection, Reinventing Hippocrates (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), where he noted that ‘Until recently, most accounts of the Hippocratic tradition tended not to explain variety, but to consider whether or not the various visions and uses of Hippocrates captured something of the original figure or his insights.’ The task used to be ‘to identify the “true” Hippocrates and then to assess the authenticity of subsequent depictions of him and his medicine’. He noted the use of Hippocrates in late 1990s computer games, in which Hippocrates could be a character using medicine for world domination, or the name of a starship or an ambulance. Now, of course, he’s in Assassins’ Creed: Odyssey, which will probably represent many people’s go-to source on him.

Since 2002, I’ve noticed how increasingly creative receptions of Hippocrates have become, and I find some of them very disturbing. Partly this is in my role as a patient, or just as a human being: it’s not that they distort some ‘true’ Hippocrates – there really isn’t one – but that they are used to sell restrictive diets or expensive treatment programmes to very sick people. Partly it’s as a historian of medicine: there’s almost no interest in whether the ‘Hippocrates quotes’ that can be found everywhere online owe anything to a Hippocratic text. Many people today don’t respond directly to actual treatises from the Hippocratic corpus, but actively construct their own Hippocrates from selected ‘quotes’.

In writing my book, I found Ika Willis’s comments on fan fiction in Reception (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018) very useful indeed. Writing fan fiction is not an entirely free process: as one writer, StillWaters1, commented, ‘I write fan fiction because I love the challenge of immersing myself in established characters and worlds, and taking them to new places while remaining true to their voices and actions … my goal is to sit back, get out of the way, and let the characters speak through my hands. I hope I do them credit [my italics].’

The work of StillWaters1 includes a 2010 story called ‘A Hippocratic Proof’. In this, the original ship’s doctor on the Enterprise, ‘Bones’ McCoy, is disturbed by evidence that Starfleet failed to act on evidence that a member of a survey team who rejected vaccination against pneumococcal meningitis had travelled on to another planet. He states, ‘I will prevent disease wherever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure’ and refers to his ‘oath’; ‘sometimes you wonder if you’ve ever been able to uphold it at all’. Mr Spock, as a Vulcan, does not understand that this comes from a modern version of the Hippocratic Oath, but Captain Kirk correctly identifies it as ‘Not the ancient Greek version, but a more modern one adapted in the twentieth century.’ Mr Spock then asks the computer to locate this version, correlates the clauses in it with McCoy’s actions as recorded in the ship’s log, and thus proves to McCoy that he is indeed remaining loyal to the Oath.

Spock, Kirk and McCoy are ‘true to their voices and actions’ in this story, making it successful as fan fiction. But that’s more difficult for Hippocrates, simply because we don’t have anything that represents his voice. For his personality, all we have are the ‘biographies’ created many years after his death; those of Soranus (early second century), the Suda (tenth century) and John Tzetzes (twelfth century). These too are fan fiction, telling us far more about the history of medicine than about Hippocrates.

Medicine itself is a mode of storytelling, whether that’s the co-creation of a story between patient and practitioner, or the retelling of the history of medicine as a way of bolstering its prestige. Fan fiction has limits, based on what fans already know about the characters. Does Hippocrates have limits? Hippocrates is a good doctor, the best doctor, depending on what the current criteria of ‘goodness’ are, and he’s always right: but today he can be presented as the rebel against the system, rather than the founder of that system. He still remains a trump card to be played in any medical competition, whether that’s about abortion, vaccination or diet. But, in the absence of any reliable knowledge of his own medical views, what that card shows always remains blurred, until someone puts it down.