"L'histoire moderne du fragment hippocratique Des remèdes", Revue des Etudes anciennes 102, 3-4 (2000), p. 361-377. (original) (raw)

 « Les Problemata hippocratiques : un exemple original de catéchisme et commentaire dans la tradition médicale et religieuse », dans Revue des Etudes grecques 120, 2007/1, p. 142−160.

The Hippocratic Problems are an anonymous corpus of 130 questions and answers, which -in a perfect Ringkompositionbegins and ends with questions resulting from the tradition of the Hippocratic Aphorisms. As Jacques Jouanna has already shown, this corpus finds its interest in many original explanations of the Aphorisms' text inside the tradition of Galenic and Byzantine commentaries of this Hippocratic treatise. Beside Hippocrates other sources, which the author refers to for his medical and physical reflexions, are at the same time in the field of the "questions and answers" literature (mostly pseudo-Alexander of Aphrodisias, but even Aristotle , Cassius Iatrosophistes and Theophylactus Simokattes), of the Neo-Platonist tradition of Aristotelian commentaries (Olympiodorus), of the Holy Scripture (Ecclesiastes, Psalms) and Church Fathers (St. John Chrysostom). By the study of the sources, we try to reveal the constitution mechanisms of this original catechism of Byzantine age.

Lire, écrire, soigner. La circulation des remèdes dans une communauté religieuse urbaine (Rome, XVIe-XVIIe siècles), in «Histoire, médecine et santé», 25, 2024, pp. 165-182

Histoire, médecine et santé, 25, 2024

This article analyses a manuscript collection of recipes (ca. 1590-1643) and its context of production and use: the Oratory of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome. This book is at once a text, a paratext, and a notebook, and its material analysis attests to the ways in which it was produced, noting the use of manuscript sources and printed books kept in the Oratorian library, and the combination of writing and reading practices. The essay also aims to highlight the role of informal and oral routes in the dissemination of medical knowledge at the Vallicella, even emphasising the way in which care practices took place there through professional carers and the sharing of knowledge and therapeutic know-how between Oratorian priests. The aim is to assess their contribution to the formation of the collection and, ultimately, to show that the compilation of recipes was part of a wider process of circulation of medical knowledge, to be situated in a specific social and cultural milieu.

« La pharmacie de Maïmonide et de Mendelssohn: l’écriture comme remède et pis-aller dans la philosophie juive », dans A. P. Mangeon et V. Feuillebois (éd.), Fictions pansantes. Bibliothérapies d’hier, d’aujourd’hui et d’ailleurs, Paris, Hermann, 2023, p. 59‑78.

Fictions pansantes. Bibliothérapies d’hier, d’aujourd’hui et d’ailleurs, 2023

Maimonides' and Mendelssohn's Pharmacy. Writing as Remedy and Fallback in Jewish Philosophy In this article, we examine the 12th-century jurist, rabbi and philosopher Moses Maimonides' revival of Platonic criticism of writing, based on Jacques Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus. We show that Maimonides also creates a dialectic between "bad" writing - poisonous, fundamentally harmful, a factor of forgetfulness and discord, and incapable of expressing the fullness of thought or the "secrets of the Torah" - and "good" writing, a remedy that denounces and circumvents as far as possible these intrinsic defects of writing. Moses Mendelssohn, the father of modern Jewish thought in the 18th century, radicalized this critique of scripture by seeing in it the principle of idolatry, but he also envisaged another "scripture" as the remedy for the first: the "ceremonial laws" of Judaism, described as "living scripture". We conclude that, from the perspective of these Jewish thinkers, books are necessary remedies against the poison of earlier, sealed books, starting with the Torah.

"La question épidémique dans le traité De peste de Janus Cornarius (1551) : un aspect de la vulgate hippocratique", Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences 162, juin 2009, p. 53-72.

Mon propos général sera de montrer que l'opposition véhiculée par l'histoire médicale entre les deux systèmes explicatifs du phénomène épidémique que seraient la théorie aériste et la théorie de la contagion, n'est pas pertinente au XVI e siècle, et qu'au contraire la théorie de la contagion se construit au sein de la théorie aériste, à partir d'une lecture de la médecine grecque sans doute plus pertinente que celle que nous en faisons à la suite des positivistes. C'est l'observation que j'ai pu faire en lisant le traité De peste de Janus Cornarius paru en 1551, écrit par l'auteur de ce que j'appelle la vulgate hippocratique, c'est-à-dire la plus influente traduction néo-latine des Opera omnia d'Hippocrate, publiée à Bâle chez Jérôme Froben en 1546 2 . Outre ce traité sur la peste, et quelques préfaces et discours, Janus Cornarius n'a lui-même écrit qu'un seul autre ouvrage sur l'organisation du savoir médical, intitulé Medicina siue Medicus, paru en 1556, et un résumé de la médecine remontant à 1529. La bibliographie de ses éditions et traductions de médecine antique compte une quarantaine de titres. Le traité De peste, à première vue peu original, se signale néanmoins à notre attention du fait que l'auteur revendique une approche spécifiquement hippocratique du sujet, qui fait par ailleurs, comme on sait, l'objet d'une littérature secondaire pléthorique à cette époque, consistant semble-t-il en recommandations diverses indéfiniment répétées 3 . Avant d'en venir à la présentation de ce qui fait l'originalité de cet

“Lecture néoplatonicienne d’Hippocrate chez Fernel, Cardan et Gemma,” in: Pratique et pensée médicales à la Renaissance, ed. Jacqueline Vons (Paris: De Boccard, 2009), 241-256 [Now see its English version in Hirai (2011)].

In his work entitled De naturae divinis characterismis (Antwerp, 1575), Cornelius Gemma (1535-1578), royal professor of medicine at the university of Louvain, makes recourse to the authority of Hippocrates in many occasions. It is not the details of Hippocrates’ medical teaching that attracted him primarily. But it is because Gemma believed to be able to find for the Greek physician a central position in the tradition of the ancient wisdom. Thus he developed the philosophical interpretation of Hippocrates, basing himself on the belief in the « ancient theology » (prisca theologia). Indeed, this belief, stemming from the work of the Florentine metaphysician Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and developed in the stream of Renaissance Neoplatonism, was in vogue in his time. The present study aims to give the first analysis of the nature and historical and intellectual context of his Hippocratism founded on this belief. The approach of Gemma is namely influenced by the works of two leading medicals humanists, Jean Fernel (1497-1558) and Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576). If the quest of the “divine” to which the Prognostic of Hippocrates appeals is important in medicine for Gemma just as for Fernel, the medical prognostication shares a common base with divination and is intimately related to astrology and prophecy in Gemma just as in Cardano. But it should be said that, in his philosophical, or more precisely, Neoplatonic interpretation of Hippocrates, the treatise On Regimen occupies the central place.