Ancient Medicine

Vivian Nutton is a leading historian of ancient medicine and this is the standard scholarly history of Greco-Roman medical thought, now in a second edition incorporating scholarship published since the first, a documented revision this record notes as real evidence of sustained engagement with the field rather than a claim about the publisher's name. It works from the primary medical corpus of Hippocrates and Galen directly to trace how humoral theory and the four temperaments developed as a systematic medical framework. Use it for established scholarly facts about ancient Greco-Roman humoral theory and the four temperaments as a historical medical doctrine; a claim about how this framework was later adapted by a non-medical tradition, astrology or alchemy among them, needs a source addressing that later adaptation directly.