Comment décrire des cas sans maladies ? La recherche d’une écriture clinique dans les 'Épidémies'

Abstract

What is clinical writing? What is its intention, its object, its purpose? And can this notion really be applied to Hippocratic writings? To explore this question, we will briefly look at the general notion of medical writing as it is addressed in several places in Hippocratic and galenic literature. We will then analyse more specifically and at length, within the Hippocratic corpus, the case of Books I and III of the Epidemics, which offer a remarkable and problematic example of what can be expected, in antiquity, from clinical writing.