Medicīnas valoda Senajā Grieķijā un tās attīstība

Translated title of the contribution: Medical Language in Ancient Greek and its Development

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Traditionally it is considered that Latin is the medical language. However, Latin was the dominant language in Roman world, though Romans themselves did not have scientific tradition in medicine, therefore Romans adopted techne of medicine from Greeks. On this account Greek should be viewed as the medical language.
There are few studies of medical language of Ancient Greece in Latvia;
a recent translation Hipokratiskie raksti. Izlase (2003) translated and edited
by classical philologists Agnese Gaile and Aija van Hofa could be mentioned.
This book consists of eleven treatises of Hippocratic Corpus translated into
Latvian and extensive scientific commentary. This article is not only about
Hippocrates and Hippocratic Corpus, but also about Galen of Pergamon and
his seminal heritage in Europe, and Roman Celsus who was the first one to
written about medicine in Latin.
The aim of the paper is to study the medical language of Ancient Greece
and its development, mainly elucidating the background on which it was created. One of the most important background aspects is the idea that Ancient
Greek physicians did not consider a disease as a punishment of gods, but as
a natural process which is understandable. This was the first step towards
rational medicine.
The paper enumerates all titles of treatises of Hippocratic Corpus and
Galenic Corpus which are formed by Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) – a
Special Research Project (University of California) of collected and digitalized texts written in Greek. All titles of corpora are translated into Latvian to
illustrate the ideas and themes which ancient physicians described.
As the topic is very broad, only the main aspects of creation and development of medical language are covered.
Translated title of the contributionMedical Language in Ancient Greek and its Development
Original languageLatvian
Pages (from-to)182-202
Number of pages21
JournalLinguistica Lettica
Issue number23
Publication statusPublished - 2015
Externally publishedYes

Field of Science*

  • 3.5 Other medical sciences
  • 6.2 Languages and Literature

Publication Type*

  • 1.4. Reviewed scientific article published in Latvia or abroad in a scientific journal with an editorial board (including university editions)

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