2026 Paul Klemperer History of Medicine Fellow Presentation

About the Speaker

Pilar Pérez Cañizares, PhD, is a classical philologist based in Vienna. Her research focuses on the textual criticism and interpretation of Greek medical texts. Her critical edition of the Hippocratic treatise On Affections appeared in the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum in 2024, and she is now preparing a complete critical edition with translation and commentary of the Hippocratic treatise On Internal Affections for the same series. She was the 2026 Paul Klemperer Fellow at New York Academy of Medicine.

Abstract

The Hippocratic fragment On Remedies (Περὶ φαρμάκων) is the only text in the Hippocratic Collection that takes drugs as its declared subject. Littré left it out of his edition of Hippocrates, as he doubted its origin. Since Schöne’s edition of 1924 it has generally been held to survive in a single Greek manuscript, Vat. Urb. gr. 64. Yet Hermann Diels had already recorded nine Greek witnesses in 1905, and Paul Potter recently found another, a manuscript copy bound into the New York Academy of Medicine’s 1526 Aldine Hippocrates. Drawing on work done as the Paul Klemperer Fellow in September 2026, this talk presents provisional results on how these witnesses relate to the Urbinas and to the early printed editions.

The fragment’s later history followed two very different paths. In Greek it survived only as an excerpt, soon taken for a complete treatise, and its transmission was thin and outside the ancient manuscripts preserving the Hippocratic Collections; this is why it entered the collected works of Hippocrates late. A thirteenth-century Latin translation, made at the court of Manfred of Sicily, was far more successful. It survives in more than twenty manuscripts, received a scholastic commentary in Bologna, and was taken into collections used for university teaching, and so was printed with Rhazes’ Liber ad Almansorem, Maimonides’ Aphorisms and the Articella. There it travelled alongside central Hippocratic works and also alongside much later pseudo-Hippocratic compilations such as the Capsula eburnea. Finally, the talk argues that the fragment, which is closely linked to the treatise On Affections, is what remains of a longer work. Comparison with On Affections indicates that this work combined a theoretical part with a collection of recipes. The theoretical part set out a systematic pharmacology of purging in the fourth century BCE: rules for when and how patients should be purged. The nosological and gynaecological treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus take this doctrine for granted but never set it out systematically. Read against these treatises, the fragment makes it possible to begin reconstructing the theory of purgative remedies that underlies them.