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

Aretaeus (Ancient Greek: Ἀρεταῖος) is one of the most celebrated of the ancient Greek physicians. Little is known of his life. He was ethnically Greek, born in the Roman province of Cappadocia, Asia Minor (modern day Turkiye),^[1]^[2]^[3] and most likely lived in the second half of the second century AD.^[4] 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.^[5] 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,^[6] 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.^[7]^[8] He wrote the first known description of coeliac disease, naming it disease of the abdomen, koiliakos.^[9]^[10] He also wrote the first known description of diabetes.^[11]

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 Methodici. Thus he freely administered active purgatives; he did not object to narcotics; he was much less averse to bleeding; and upon the whole his Materia Medica was both ample and efficient.

It may be asserted generally that there are few of the ancient physicians, since the time of Hippocrates, who appear to have been less biased by attachment to any peculiar set of opinions, and whose account of the phenomena and treatment of disease has better stood the test of subsequent experience. Aretaeus is placed by some writers among the Pneumatici because he maintained the doctrines which are peculiar to this sect; other systematic writers, however, think that he is better entitled to be placed with the Eclectics.

Works

Aretaeus' work consists of eight books, two De causis et signis acutorum morborum, two De causis et signis diuturnorum morborum, two De curatione acutorum morborum, and two De curatione diuturnorum morborum. They are in a tolerably complete state of preservation, though a few chapters are lost.

The work was first published in a Latin translation by Junius Paulus Crassus (Giunio Paolo Grassi), Venice 1552, together with Rufus of Ephesus. The first Greek edition is that by Jacobus Goupylus, Paris, 1554, which is more complete than the Latin version of Crassus. In 1723 a major edition in folio was published at the Clarendon Press at Oxford, edited by John Wigan, containing an improved text, a new Latin version, learned dissertations and notes, and a copious index by Michel Maittaire. In 1731, Boerhaave brought out a new edition, of which the text and Latin version had been printed before the appearance of Wigan's; this edition contains annotations by Pierre Petit and Daniel Wilhelm Triller. The edition by C. G. Kühn, Leipzig 1828, included Wigan's text, Latin version, dissertations, etc., together with Petit's commentary, Triller's emendations, and Maittaire's index. An edition by F. Z. Ermerins was published in Utrecht in 1847.

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 Johann Albert Fabricius, Albrecht von Haller, and Kurt Sprengel. Aretaeus has been treated more recently in a couple of short monographs:

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

^ Toledo-Pereyra, Luis H. (2006). Origins of the knife: early encounters with the history of surgery. Landes Bioscience. p. 100. ISBN 978-1-57059-694-0. Aretaeus the Cappadocian (81-138 AD) was the fourth surgeon of distinction considered during the times between Celsus and Galen. He was a Greek, born in Cappadocia, a Roman province in Asia Minor.
^ Talbott, John Harold (1970). A biographical history of medicine: excerpts and essays on the men and their work. Grune & Stratton. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-8089-0657-5. Aretaeus, a Greek, was born in Cappadocia, a Roman province in Asia Minor, several centuries after Hippocrates.
^ Poretsky, Leonid (2002). Principles of Diabetes Mellitus. Springer. p. 20. ISBN 978-1-4020-7114-0. Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a Greek physician who practiced in Rome and Alexandria in the second century AD, was the first to distinguish between what we now call diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus.
^ Tekiner, Halil (2015). "Aretaeus of Cappadocia and his treatises on diseases". Turkish Neurosurgery. 25 (3): 508–512. doi:10.5137/1019-5149.JTN.12347-14.0. ISSN 1019-5149. PMID 26037198.
^ García-Albea Ristol, E. (March 2009). "[Aretaeus of Cappadocia (2nd century AD) and the earliest neurological descriptions]". Revista de Neurología (in Spanish). 48 (6): 322–327. ISSN 1576-6578. PMID 19291658.
^ Tsoucalas, Gregory; Sgantzos, Markos (September–October 2016). "Aretaeus of Cappadocia (ca 1st-3rd century AD): views on hepatic cancer". Journal of B.U.ON. 21 (5): 1326–1331. ISSN 1107-0625. PMID 27837644.
^ Pearce, J. M. S. (2013). "The neurology of Aretaeus: Radix Pedis Neurologia". European Neurology. 70 (1–2): 106–112. doi:10.1159/000352031. ISSN 1421-9913. PMID 23969486.
^ Pyatnitskiy, N. Yu (2018). "[To the origins of the 'unitary psychosis' doctrine: from Aretaeus to V. Chiarugi]". Zhurnal Nevrologii I Psikhiatrii Imeni S.S. Korsakova (in Russian). 118 (5): 111–119. doi:10.17116/jnevro201811851111. ISSN 1997-7298. PMID 29927415.
^ "Founding Physicians of Celiac - Aretaeus". Celiac, Simply. Archived from the original on 2017-04-09. Retrieved 2017-04-08.
^ Paveley, W. F. (1988-12-24). "From Aretaeus to Crosby: a history of coeliac disease". BMJ: British Medical Journal. 297 (6664): 1646–1649. doi:10.1136/bmj.297.6664.1646. ISSN 0959-8138. PMC 1838854. PMID 3147783.
^ Laios, Konstantinos; Karamanou, Marianna; Saridaki, Zenia; Androutsos, George (January 2012). "Aretaeus of Cappadocia and the first description of diabetes". Hormones. 11 (1): 109–113. doi:10.1007/BF03401545. ISSN 2520-8721. PMID 22450352. S2CID 4730719.