There are good reasons for believing that diseases and complaints of various kinds and degrees of sever­ity were as much a part of everyday life in classical antiquity as were the assorted battle wounds and injuries so dramatically portrayed from Homer on­ward.

This is indicated not only by the surviving Greek and Latin medical texts and the fragments preserved in Greco-Egyptian papyri, but also by the large corpus of nonmedical Greek and Latin texts, some of which are still being read today.

To be certain, the evidence, both written and nonwritten, has survived in different states of preser­vation. It permits us, nonetheless, to reconstruct in part the intellectual and technological achievements of our past. Large gaps, however, exist in our knowl­edge of that past, and the absence of crucial details has led to hypotheses and inferences that cannot be tested directly.

Our knowledge of the diseases of classical antiq­uity stands somewhere between demonstrative cer­tainty and complete ignorance. There is, after all, a sizable body of Greek and Latin medical texts, and it, in turn, has generated an even larger body of secondary literature. But for all that, our knowledge of the diseases of classical antiquity is far from com­plete. There are several reasons for its incomplete­ness, but it is important to keep in mind the enor­mous differences between the conceptual bases of the modern medical sciences and those of antiquity. These differences have important consequences in any attempt to identify the diseases of classical an­tiquity and to understand their effects.

One significant consequence is primarily philologi­cal: Many Greek and Latin medical terms cannot be rendered adequately by any single term in most mod­ern languages. A case in point is the specialized vo­cabulary denoting diseases, used primarily though not exclusively by the ancient medical writers. Obvi­ously this has a bearing on the study of disease.

A second consequence, far more formidable than the philological one just noted, concerns the very foundations of classical medicine. Beginning with Hippocrates, and accepted by the better medical writ­ers throughout classical antiquity, was the notion of disease as a process. Regardless of the philosophical theory that supported the etiology, whether hu- moralism or solidism, a disease, theoretically, could be described as a series of stages with a predictable outcome. Each of those stages normally occupied a narrowly circumscribed period of time, such as 7,14, or 20 days. Associated with the chronological devel­opment was a series of changes in the condition of the patient, each of which was described in specific, though not necessarily unique, terms representing the symptom or symptoms associated with that spe­cific stage of the disease. It is with respect to the latter point that grave difficulties are encountered in an attempt to identify some of the diseases of classical antiquity. First of all, it was widely be­lieved that some diseases were capable of passing into or changing into another disease. The latter was then characterized by its distinctive symptom or symptoms, which often were similar to the principal symptom or symptoms that characterized the origi­nal disease process. The newly arisen disease was then regarded as a species of the disease from which it originated at a certain stage in the morbid process. Then it too ran its predictable course, although therapeutic intervention (drug therapy, regiminary therapy, or surgery) might alter its course.

There was considerable discussion in antiquity con­cerning the proper nomenclature and, of course, ther­apy of these so-called species or varieties of a disease; and as one might guess, there was little agreement concerning details, especially with regard to their classification. On one issue, however, there was agree­ment and that was the widely adopted classification of diseases as acute or chronic. In the main, acute diseases were characterized by a sudden onset, a clearly circumscribed febrile stage, and the involve­ment of a specific localized area, frequently the respi­ratory or digestive system. As such, most of our infec­tious diseases were regarded as acute diseases in classical antiquity. Those disease processes in which a clearly demarcated febrile stage was absent and whose outcome could not be predicted on the basis of a specified sequence of stages fell into the larger, less organized category of chronic disease (e.g., gout, lead poisoning, and scurvy).

Because it was not possible to base an etiology on specific microscopic, pathological organisms, close attention was paid to the description of symptoms at each stage of the disease process, from onset to out­come. Thus, many of the so-called species or vari­eties of a disease acquired distinctive names; these were based on a few of the salient symptoms or on a consistent clinical pattern, the latter resembling what later came to be called a syndrome (literally, a “running together” of symptoms).

It must be stressed, finally, that ancient therapeu­tics was almost wholly symptomatic. Consequently, the large body of literature surviving from classical antiquity must be used with due recognition of the fact that the illnesses for which the many hundreds of recipes and remedies were designed must be con­sidered, in the main, to be symptoms and syndromes.

These caveats notwithstanding, some of the dis­eases of classical antiquity can be identified with assurance and others can be identified with degrees of confidence that vary in proportion to both the qual­ity and the quantity of the evidence at our disposal. In either case, however, efforts have been made to sum­marize the etiologic, epidemiological, and pathologi­cal evidence in such a fashion that the diseases of classical antiquity can be correlated historically with the same diseases viewed in later terms.