The embarrassment of imperfection: Galen's assessment of Hippocrates' linguistic merits.

In antiquity the 'higher' study of medicine shared with many other disciplines a pronounced philological character. Galen both exploited this 'philological paradigm' and underwent its influence. He exploited it in that it enabled him to invest the Corpus Hippocraticum with a dignity comparable to that of Homer only. But his philological instrumentarium, originally designed for the study of literary texts, also forced him to pose and answer certain questions that shed no light whatsoever on the informational content of Hippocrates' writings, questions about Hippocrates' language and style. Galen disentangles himself from the ensuing embarrassment by claiming that Hippocrates' style was ideal for the specific didactic genre he was involved in. This special style necessitates a reassessment of customary grammatical and rhetorical values: correctness recedes into the background, clarity and brevity become the predominant virtues of style.