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Thomas M. Walshe. Neurological Concepts in Ancient Greek Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xv + 204 pp. $55.00 (978-0-190-21856-0).
This book offers a survey of neurological concepts from the Homeric epics to the Hellenistic period. Six of the eleven chapters deal with neurological themes in the Hippocratic corpus. The final chapter ("The Hippocratic Oath and a Modern Digression") is a critical and salutary contemplation of aspects of contemporary medicine, especially its relationship with technology (p. 187). Each chapter ends with a bibliography, which adds to the self-contained nature of this book, since each is an essay in its own right. Indeed, the contents are revised versions of material that has had, in some cases, a gestation period of thirty years, which runs the risk that certain parts remain dated. The intended audience is a medical one, seeking to give a "summary from a neurological viewpoint of the information that has been published by professional classicists and historians" (p. xi). This aim is laudable, for Walshe is intending not a comprehensive history of neurology in antiquity, but rather a description of "various ancient Greek ideas that pertain to our...