Aretaeus of Cappadocia

Aretaeus of Cappadocia
Born	Ἀρεταῖος
Nationality	Greek
Occupation	Physician
Years active	2nd century AD

Aretaeus (Greek: Ἀρεταῖος) is one of the most celebrated of the ancient Greek physicians. Little is known of his life. He presumably was a native or at least a citizen of Cappadocia, a Roman province in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey), and most likely lived in the second half of the second century AD.^[1] He is generally styled "the Cappadocian" (Καππάδοξ).

Diagnostic method

Aretaeus wrote in Ionic Greek. His eight treatises on diseases, which are still extant, are considered to be among the most important Greco-Roman medical works ever written.^[2] His valuable work displays great accuracy in the detail of symptoms, and in seizing the diagnostic character of diseases. In his practice he followed for the most part the method of Hippocrates, but he paid less attention to what have been styled "the natural actions" of the system; and, contrary to the practice of the Father of Medicine, he did not hesitate to attempt to counteract them, when they appeared to him to be injurious.

Aretaeus offered clinical descriptions of a number of diseases among which he gave classic accounts of asthma, epilepsy, pneumonia, tetanus, uterine cancer, liver cancer,^[3] and different kinds of insanity. He differentiated nervous diseases and mental disorders and described hysteria, headaches, mania and melancholia. Some of his thinking about neurological disorders anticipated 19th and 20th century notions.^[4][5] He wrote the first known description of coeliac disease, naming it disease of the abdomen, koiliakos.^[6][7] He also wrote the first known description of diabetes.^[8]

The account which Aretaeus gives of his treatment of various diseases indicates a simple and sagacious system, and one of more energy than that of the professed

A more recent standard edition is by Karl Hude (1860–1936) in the Corpus medicorum graecorum (2nd ed., Berlin, Akademie-Verlag, 1958, online). The four books De causis et signis have now been issued in an annotated bilingual edition in Greek and French (Arétée de Cappadoce, Des causes et des signes des maladies aiguës et chroniques, trans. R.T.H. Laennec, ed. and comm. Mirko D. Grmek, pref. by Danielle Gourevitch, Geneva, 2000).

Secondary literature

The medical opinions of Aretaeus have been discussed by such scholars as

• Karl Deichgräber, Aretaeus von Kappadozien als medizinischer Schriftsteller, Berlin, 1971.
• Fridolf Kudlien, Untersuchungen zu Aretaios von Kappadokien, Mainz, 1964.

For Aretaeus' influence on Giambattista Morgagni, the father of anatomical pathology, see:

• Giorgio Weber, Areteo di Cappadocia: interpretazioni e aspetti della formazione anatomo-patologica del Morgagni, Florence, 1996

References