Greek Medical Manuscripts - Diels’ Catalogue

The series Medical Traditions is devoted to the transmission of the medical knowledge gained through a centuries-long practice and attested by an abundant textual corpus in handwritten form. It publishes original monographs and collections of essays resulting from innovative, cross-disciplinary research providing both primary data for further developments and new insights on any facet of the complex process of conveying medical knowledge.

The medical literature of ancient Greece has been much studied during the 20th century, with a particular activity from the 1970s on. In spite of this intense activity, the search for Greek medical manuscripts still relies on the catalogues compiled in the early 20th century by a group of philologists led by the German historian of Greek philosophy and medicine Hermann Diels. However useful the so-called Diels has been and still is, it is now in need of a thorough revision. The present six-tome set is a first step in that direction. In tome 1 it offers a fac-simile reproduction of Diels' catalogues with an index of all the manuscripts cited throughout the work. In the following three tomes, it provides a reconstruction of the text contained in the manuscripts listed in Diels on the basis of Diels' catalogue. Proceeding as Diels did, these three tomes distinguish the manuscripts containing Hippocratic texts (2), Galenic texts (3) and all the other texts considered in Diels (4). Tome 5 sums up all the information about all texts in each manuscript and tome 6 offers a concordance of all citations of manuscripts in the 5 tomes, in addition to the index of the non-Greek manuscripts and addenda. The present work will be a reference for all scholars interested in Greek medical literature and manuscripts, as well as for any historian of medicine, medical book, medical tradition and medical culture.