History of medicine is not a game
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
History of medicine is not a game Philippe Charlier1,2 · Nadia Benmoussa1,3 · Clarisse Prêtre4 · Christol Fabre3,5 Received: 30 June 2020 / Accepted: 4 July 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Keywords Hippocrate · Cholesteatoma · Medical history · Antiquity We have read with great interest the comments made by our esteemed colleague in his letter to the editor. The problem that arises seems mainly to be methodological. It seems indeed extremely difficult to make a retrospective diagnosis on ancient human remains, we have written and demonstrated it [1],and therefore, a fortiori, even more difficult when it is an ancient text, even from the Hippocratic collection. One of the main methodological pitfalls is to “stick” a current physiological vision on an ancient description. Modern physicians (MDs) do not think the same way, do not look at the symptoms and causes of illness in the same way. Even the anatomy is not described in a comparable way: some structures are not identified independently, others are incorrectly considered. We do not make this mistake, but we must not refuse the obvious: we must not exclude an abscess because « Hippocrates» does not mention it, we must not exclude a fistula because the consecrated term does not
This reply refers to the comment available online at https://doi. org/10.1007/s00405-020-06153-x. * Nadia Benmoussa [email protected] 1
Section of Medical and Forensic Anthropology (UVSQ/EA4498 DANTE Laboratory), UFR of Health Sciences, 2 avenue de la Source de la Bièvre, 78180 Montigny‑Le‑Bretonneux, France
2
Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Université, 222 rue de l, 75007 Paris, France
3
Department of Head and Neck Oncology, Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France
4
UMR 7041 ArScAn, Maison René Ginouvès, University Paris Ouest, 200 avenue de la République, 92001 Nanterre Cedex, France
5
Otolaryngology‑Head and Neck Surgery Department, Grenoble Alpes University Hospital, BP217, 38043 Grenoble Cedex 09, France
appear in the original manuscript. A description or a series of clinical signs is sometimes sufficient to offer an accurate diagnosis. Our esteemed colleague compares the Hippocratic treaties as if they were all in the same hand, which is a manifest error: Epidemics I, IV, V and Prorrhetic. The work of Jacques Jouanna has clearly shown that Epidemics treatises can be grouped into three subgroups written at different times by different practitioners: I and III; II, IV and VI; V and VII [2]. Our original article [3] therefore consists in a proposal for a retrospective diagnosis. But this one takes much more weight when one takes into account the frequency of the symptoms (and, as a matter of fact, one is obliged to be based on the current statistics, in populations which approach at most the ancient populations, in particular by a few specific criteria: lack of access to antibiotics, presence of poly-parasitism, etc.). Our colleague systematically criticizes each of the clinical signs prese
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