Not-so-Great Courses

One of the Google alerts I have to notify me of anything new in my various fields of interest is on the word “Hippocrates”. On 5 March 2021 it came up with a link to a page called ‘The Foundations of Modern Medicine’, which appears to be a short summary of a section of a course run in the Great Courses series: ‘An Introduction to Infectious Diseases’ written by Professor Barry C. Fox of the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin. After some comments on testing for infectious diseases, this has a section on Hippocrates. The course trailer boasts of the “clear and up to date information” offered by the course, but that certainly doesn’t apply when it comes to historical information.

What does Fox claim about Hippocrates? Well, there’s some misleading material about him founding a “college” called “the Hippocratic School of Medicine”; this reflects the common misunderstanding by which a ‘school’ of medicine, meaning a particular approach, becomes a physical place. It then gets worse, with a completely confused section in which the four humours are not blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile, but “Earth, Water, Fire, and Air”. Those, of course, are the elements, not the humours. Air is apparently “linked to red blood cells”, which is quite an achievement as they hadn’t been discovered yet! The relevance of the four humours is pretty marginal, because they aren’t found in all ‘Hippocratic’ treatises and scholars of ancient medicine would now emphasise that it is Galen’s attempt to create ‘Hippocrates’ in his own image that led to a Hippocratic treatise – Nature of man – which includes the four being elevated to become ‘by the real Hippocrates’.

But I was most amused to find that there follows a repeat of the Wikipedia fiction that Hippocrates spent time in prison and used this to write his “important” medical book, The Complicated Body, which according to Fox “set the course for the future of modern medicine”. In a spin on the Wikipedia story that was new to me, we read not just the standard claim that Hippocrates was imprisoned because his beliefs “went against the government” but a suggestion that Hippocrates favoured human dissection and the government banned this. Er, what? Hippocrates, who never did human dissection?? This online fiction really is the gift that goes on giving. There are other ‘creative responses’ to Hippocrates – I’ve mentioned some here – but this one has spun completely out of control. When I wrote Hippocrates Now: The ‘Father of Medicine’ in the internet age (2020) I was already entertained by the various modern writers who’ve told us what is in The Complicated Body – quite an achievement, for a book which doesn’t exist and never has existed – but this dissection variant was a new one for me.

I was delighted when my publisher, Bloomsbury, released my book in a fully open-access version, meaning that anyone could read it; the chapter on the prison and book story is Chapter 3. My views on that story are not some hypothesis which can be disputed. It’s simple: there are no primary sources for either part of the story and everything you find online or in print about them postdates the insertion on the Wikipedia ‘Hippocrates’ page, something that happened on 12 December 2010. That’s a matter of record and is visible to anyone looking at the history of the page. The material was deleted in 2014 when I found it there and challenged it as a myth. But the myth lives on because the imaginary ‘facts’ were copied by others during the period 2010-2014. This means that – as you’d expect from the rest of the historical course material – the source for this ‘Great Courses’ product is Wikipedia or a derivative from it.

When I found this Great Courses page, I tweeted about it and also wrote to the contact address for Great Courses, to point out that this is just plain wrong. They haven’t replied. So, I conclude, like the author, they really don’t care about history. Why is that?

I have two suggestions. First, and alarmingly, that medical authors are not particularly bothered about details. When I was writing Hippocrates Now, I came across an article by Gerald de Lacey, Carol Record and Jenny Wade, ‘How accurate are quotations and references in medical journals?’ (BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 291 (1985)), which showed that in these journal articles “the original author was misquoted in 15% of all references, and most of the errors would have misled readers”. Second, following up on a 2018 piece I wrote with Professor Monica Green for The Lancet, I’d observe that, while medical authors feel the need to include some history, they don’t realise that history is a dynamic field in which there are changes in how we understand the past. Since we published that short piece, Monica and I have had the pleasant experience of being approached by scientific or medical journals to peer-review work with a historical component. That’s how it should be. Not this imaginary material passed off as ‘history’.