What Would Hippokrates Do? Classical Reception in the Age of COVID-19

Did Hippokrates cure the Athenian plague? What can the so-called Father of Medicine teach us about pandemics? Would Hippokrates endorse lockdowns and vaccination? With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in the West, numerous articles, blog posts, interviews, and entire books have made similarly facile ancient-modern parallels. To borrow from Neville Morley’s quip regarding invocations of Thucydides’ account of the Athenian plague, “Thucydides is a virus… turning those infected into dribbling zombies writing op-eds about how current events demonstrate the eternal relevance of Thucydides” (and, we might add, of Hippokrates). 

This kind of thinking may feel deeply tired, overly presentist, and unrelated to the devastation of a pandemic that continues to rage. As Yung-in Chae wrote for Eidolon in March 2020, “Classics,” at least as it is currently configured, “will not save us.” 

Many seem to hope it will nonetheless. Hippokrates has been adopted as a patron saint of proponents of holistic and alternative medicine, the wellness industry, and anti-vaccination communities. By examining the viral spread of Hippokrates in online spaces and contextualizing the logic underlying this reception in light of the history of Hippokratic receptions more broadly, this development becomes less surprising than it may initially appear.

As examined by one episode of Maintenance Phase, a podcast that interrogates the ideological underpinnings of health fads and wellness scams, there is a deep interrelationship between wellness and conspiracy communities that has become painfully visible in the age of COVID. In a content analysis of tweets I found using Twitter’s advanced search function, I discovered that the figure of Hippokrates looms large at the intersection of these interests.

I conducted my search in mid 2021, setting the search parameters to March 2020 (when many western nations acknowledged COVID-19) to present, and searching for ‘Hippocrates’ and ‘COVID’ in all languages. Below is a small sampling of particularly telling tweets and hashtags.

Users’ sentiments range from accusing doctors of overestimating the number of coronavirus cases (i.e., in order to get some kind of bonus from the pharmaceutical industry) to the idea that “stopping the spread” itself inflicts deaths. 

We see frequent invocations not only of “do no harm” and the Hippokratic Oath, but also of aphorisms like “Let food be thy medicine.” 

One suspended Twitter account, “Hippocrates Has Fallen,” often replies scathingly to tweets supporting COVID restrictions and describes themselves as a “medical red-piller.” 

King explains how anti-scientific Hippokratic receptions are made possible by celebratory views of the ancient physician as preeminently rational: his association with the idea of “nature,” as she discusses in a chapter on holistic medicine, can be juxtaposed to the supernatural (as in antiquity) or to the artificial (as on the internet). For anti-vaxxers, whose lack of faith in immunological interventions finds its echo in Hippokrates’ “natural” approach to healthcare, Greek medicine represents Western medicine’s prelapsarian state. However, the idealization of Hippokrates is also a weakness among people who do trust Western science. For example, in a 2020 BBC article (published while Boris Johnson was hospitalized for COVID), Armand D’Angour juxtaposes Hippokrates with ancient quacks and aligns him with modern biomedicine. Therefore “it may be that Hippocrates will come to [Johnson’s] mind, as well as Pericles and Thucydides,” D’Angour proposes.

Academics and journalists across different fields and perspectives feed this tendency by valorizing Hippokrates as a hero for our time. Science writer Adam Voiland opens a 2020 feature for NASA by using Hippokratic ideas to suggest that COVID-19 may weaken in the summer (though epidemiologists at the time already had declared seasonal variability to be, at most, minor transmission factor). A series of editorials in The American Journal of Bioethics (one of which is named “Don’t Blame Hippocrates for Low Enrollment in Clinical Trials”) use Hippokratic injunctions to debate the risks of clinical COVID-19 research. Sometimes, however, Hippokratic medicine is cited as junk science or patently absurd. In a 2020 article for The Conversation, English professor David Roberts lists “light[ing] bonfires” and “throw[ing] herbs and spices” as patently Hippokratic remedies for plague (an apocryphal claim). The article was written in response to Donald Trump’s recommendation to ingest bleach as a cure for COVID, to humanize Trump by casting him in “the long line of those who, desperately seeking real cures, have found fakes.” Even when a Hippokratic therapy is in hindsight recognized as a “fake,” the cultural authority of Hippokratic medicine as a whole remains upheld as a symbol for scientific medicine.

In the face of such receptions, what is one to do? Both conceptions—Hippokrates as founder of scientific medicine, Hippokrates  as founder of anti-science movements—derive their normative power from using the physician’s name and maxims as a fount of wisdom. None of these think pieces actually engage with the strange, diverse set of texts and ideas that comprise ancient medicine. It remains to be seen what public scholarly engagement with ancient medicine’s weirdness might look like.

Instead, there’s a tendency to overestimate the capacity of Classics, and academia in general, to inoculate against misinformation and bigotry. While the humanities certainly have the ability to cultivate “critical thinking,” thinking critically is not necessarily thinking ethically — nor is it immune to weaponization, as shown by the humanities degrees of many reactionary politicians from elite institutions. In the case of the pandemic, consider also the example of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a theorist of biopolitics who remains influential among left-wing academics. Since 2020, Agamben has on multiple occasions called COVID a state-manufactured hoax and compared COVID-19 precautions such as facemasks and vaccination to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust—a comparison he shares with the far-right conspiracy theorist and US Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

At the core of this issue lie questions of appropriation and exceptionalism. Well-intentioned attempts to correct the record and restore the ancients’ “original” texts and ideas will never be as radical as they seem. Trying to purify lazy, harmful, or simply misguided receptions of medical material through pedantry is, to quote Holly Ranger, merely “the white will to power expressed in the desire to claim Daddy’s authority for oneself.”* We can’t trade Bad Hippokrates (what the Hippokratics didn’t say, or we wish they didn’t) for Good Hippokrates (who does not exist). Nor can we disavow the ambiguity of the act of receiving classical ideas, with all their baggage included.

If pandemics are indeed portals “to break with the past,” as Arundhati Roy has suggested, and “gateway[s] between one world and the next,” what worlds could historians of medicine, responding to the pandemic, create? Rightly, COVID-19 has forced scholars of ancient medicine to admit that our professional reflexes, methods, and assumptions do not always meet the demands of the moment. What, then, is the study of ancient medicine for? I would argue that dismantling the exceptionalism of classical material is one place to start.

*Ranger, H. "Critical Reception Studies: The White Feminism of Feminist Reception Studies," presented at: The Case for Critical Ancient World Studies. University of Oxford, September 7, 2020.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

Bratton, B. (2021.) “Agamben WTF, or How Philosophy Failed the Pandemic.” Verso Books Blog.

Chae, Y.I. (2020.) “Classics Will Not Save Us.” Eidolon. 

King, H. (2019.) Hippocrates Now: The “Father of Medicine” in the Internet Age. London; New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.

Maintenance Phase. (2021.) “The Wellness to QAnon Pipeline.” 

Morley, N. (2013.) “Thucydides Quote Unquote.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 20, PP. 9–36. 

Roy, A. (2020.) “The Pandemic is a Portal.” The Financial Times.