The Beginnings of Clinical Descriptions. The Case of an Open Pneumothoraxin Epid. V 96

Abstract

We present below the commentary of a selection of texts belonging to books V and VII of the books of Epidemics (Corpus Hippocraticum). The analysis of these texts, as we will see, allows us to contextualize these clinical histories in a specific military confrontation: the siege of the Thracian city of Dato during the Macedonian wars. The Macedonian armies revolutionized war tactics with the use of the sarissa (a type of spear that was about six meters long), and the conquest of cities through siege. These war tactics caused a certain type of wound that the Hippocratic physician describes with great realism. The careful observation of the Hippocratic physician, the precision of the vocabulary used and the description of the symptoms, as well as the intellectual need to write down the symptoms in an orderly manner, allow us to identify modern diagnoses, as occurs in the case of the Bilos, Dislitas and Audelo wounds that we can identify with a lung disease caused by trauma with an open wound and that we currently call open pneumothorax.