Even the ancient name of the group of medical treatises on which Lane Fox focuses, the Epidemics, turns out to be misleading: the term simply referred to diseases present in communities, rather than to diseases that spread like wildfire between communities, affecting large proportions of their populations. But The Invention of Medicine, although covering such famous outbreaks of plague as that which blighted Athens early in the Peloponnesian War, described in such detail by the historian Thucydides (to whom we shall return), offers precious few parallels for the present.
Interest in contagious diseases has rarely been so high. The timing of Robin Lane Fox’s lively reappraisal of the evidence for the earliest Greek ‘rational’ medicine could not be better.
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