From “Season” to “Hour”

Abstract

AbstractChapter 5 examines how Galen incorporates references to hourly timekeeping into his justifications for and refinement of Hippocratic “critical-day” schemes, which were designed to help physicians anticipate turning points in febrile diseases. This chapter proposes that Galen, in both his fever case histories and his astrological explanations for critical days, used hourly timekeeping to support a set of interrelated claims: first, that the Hippocratic writings are internally consistent and prefigure later technological developments, like hourly timekeeping; second, that Galen alone should be seen as the true successor of Hippocrates; and third, that, in keeping with Hippocratic injunctions, Galen’s own approach to medicine integrated knowledge and methods appropriate to the highly esteemed mathematical sciences—in this case, to astronomy.