A Theatre of Humours. Nosology and Nosography in the Hippocratic Treatise Diseases I (De morbis I)

Among the “nosological treatises” of the Hippocratic Corpus Book I of Diseases emerges as a very peculiar work. It is an eclectic but nonetheless relatively coherent work which shows some common traits, from the nosological as well as from the nosographic and terminological point of view, and this appears to be the peculiar achievement of a medical ‘author’ interested in poetical and rhetorical effects. The author of Diseases I shows a wide and varied knowledge of physiological as well as physiopathological matters, which means he was largely involved in the scientific debate of the time; in this sense, he seems to have taken into account the coeval medical literature much more than other medical authors who are indebted to him. On one hand he proposes a high consideration of the traditional data, but on the other hand his approach to diseases contemplates systematically aetiological interests which did not belong to the traditional, the so-called ‘Cnidian’, nosographic scheme.