Airs, Waters, Places

Summary

Airs, Waters, Places is an ancient Greek medical text, probably written around 400 BCE and attributed by tradition to Hippocrates. The treatise tells a traveling physician how to read any unfamiliar city’s disease character by studying its prevailing winds, water supply, and seasonal patterns. A second section extends this logic into a comparison of Asian and European peoples, arguing that climate explains physical constitution, character, and even political temperament. As Jouanna has argued, the work was the first systematic treatise of medical climatology in world literature and the first of anthropology. Its environmental approach to disease — disease explained by place and season rather than supernatural cause alone — shaped Plato, Vitruvius, and Islamic medicine, and resurfaced as a governing framework in epidemiology and public health long after germ theory displaced the miasma tradition the text helped establish. (Jouanna, 1999)

Date, Authorship, and the Hippocratic Question

The text circulates under Hippocrates’ name, but authorship is in doubt. The Hippocratic Corpus — some sixty treatises collected at Alexandria in the third century BCE — contains works of widely differing style, physiological assumption, and therapeutic orientation. No modern scholar attributes the corpus as a whole to a single author. For Airs, Waters, Places specifically, the evidence for Hippocratic authorship rests largely on the cumulative weight of ancient opinion.

Wesley Smith, in The Hippocratic Tradition, examines this evidentiary problem closely. Littre, the great nineteenth-century editor and translator of the Corpus, took the “unanimous testimony of antiquity” as decisive for the genuineness of Airs, Waters, Places. (Wesley D. Smith, 1979) Yet the unanimity is not as clean as Littre claimed. Diels, working later, had to construct a somewhat strained account to explain how Menon’s Iatrika — a doxographical register of physicians’ opinions on disease causation — passed over Airs, Waters, Places when excerpting Hippocrates: Diels suggested that Menon went to the Lyceum library and somehow missed the genuine works. (Wesley D. Smith, 1979) The awkwardness of this explanation indicates how contested the attribution actually was. Ludwig Edelstein, more skeptical still, argued that the Hippocratic emphasis on prognosis — so prominent in Airs, Waters, Places — should not be read as nascent science but as a competitive strategy: prognosis was useful when physicians were competing for patients in a crowded marketplace. (Wesley D. Smith, 1979) Smith himself places Airs, Waters, Places in the canon of works regarded as “most genuine and most useful” within the tradition — meaning it held canonical status whether or not Hippocrates wrote it. (Wesley D. Smith, 1979)

The text’s date is more tractable than its authorship. Internal references to the seasonal positions of stars and to the equinox have been used by scholars to situate the work around 400 BCE. The treatise is now probably written during the closing decades of the fifth century, and it is in that period that the environmental reasoning it perfects seems to have achieved its widest circulation. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Jouanna notes that Hippocrates left Cos for Thessaly at some point, and that the author’s stated interest in how different natural environments affect different constitutions might plausibly reflect personal experience of geographical medicine. (Jouanna, 1999) This is biographically speculative, but the logic is internally consistent with the text’s method.

Littre, working in the nineteenth century, included Airs, Waters, Places among his eleven treatises considered authentically Hippocratic — a relatively short list, even by the standards of his time, that placed the work in the inner canon. (Jouanna, 1999) Modern scholarship is more skeptical even than Littre on the authorship question, but few would dispute the work’s place in the core of the Hippocratic tradition.

Genre: Public Demonstration

Jouanna distinguishes two genres of Hippocratic discourse: private didactic lectures addressed to students and specialists, and public rhetorical presentations — epideixeis — designed for broader audiences. Airs, Waters, Places falls into the second category. (Jouanna, 1999) This framing helps explain the text’s confident scope: it is presenting medicine’s competence to a public, demonstrating that environmental reasoning extends medical authority beyond the individual clinical encounter into geography, ethnography, and city planning. The treatise’s rhetoric of comprehensiveness — claiming that climate explains everything from disease to character to political disposition — was part of its persuasive architecture, not an accidental overreach.

Content and Structure

The Traveling Physician’s Problem

The treatise opens with a practical scenario: a physician arriving in an unfamiliar city must quickly read its disease environment. The author’s method is systematic. Observe which way the city faces — toward the rising or setting sun, toward hot or cold winds. Note the prevailing winds, whether moist or dry, northerly or southerly. Assess the water supply: is it stagnant marsh water, hard mountain water, soft rainwater collected in cisterns? Note the seasonal sequence of the year. Taken together, these four factors allow the physician to predict the diseases a population will suffer before he has examined a single patient.

Nutton identifies Airs, Waters, Places as the most celebrated example of geographical medicine in the ancient world, a text that “instructs the travelling doctor” in exactly this systematic reading of environmental conditions. (Nutton, 2023) The work belongs to a recognizable genre of Hippocratic practical writing, but it extends the genre’s scope well beyond the individual patient.

The Four Exposures

The treatise’s environmental assessment rests on four pillars: the city’s orientation relative to prevailing winds, the quality and origin of the water supply, the topographical situation (marshy valley, exposed hillside, sheltered cove), and the seasonal character of the year — whether winters are harsh or mild, springs wet or dry, summers moderate or extreme. Each combination produces predictable constitutional types and characteristic disease patterns. The author is not merely cataloguing clinical observations; he is offering a theory of how environment shapes constitution over time, from birth and childhood onward. A key formulation at Aer. 13 makes this explicit: where seasons experience the greatest and most frequent changes, the land itself is wild and uneven, and the people correspondingly diverse, some physiques resembling wooded mountains, others dry plains, others marshy meadows. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The variety of human forms mirrors the variety of landscapes because the seasons that modify physical frames operate by the same logic that shapes terrain.

The treatment of water is particularly detailed. Stagnant pond and marsh water produces bloated spleens, hard abdomens, and fevers that persist through the summer. Spring water from exposed rocky ground is cold, hard, and unhealthy for the kidneys. Soft rainwater, light and sweet, is the best for cooking but spoils quickly. The physician who can assess the water supply on arrival has a direct window into the population’s chronic disease burden. The text offers the Phasis valley in Colchis as its extreme case: the inhabitants, living in lacustrine wood-and-reed houses on stilts and drinking stagnant hot water, were described as the most disease-ridden people encountered. (Jouanna, 1999)

The treatise’s environmental analysis also establishes a distinction that would prove foundational for epidemic medicine: the difference between endemic and epidemic disease. Endemic diseases are a function of the specific site — the prevailing winds, water quality, and orientation of a particular city. Pormann notes that south-facing cities sheltered from cold northerly winds produce inhabitants who tend to “flabbiness” (phlegmatic, in the text’s language), while north-facing cities with hard, cold water produce lean, bilious citizens. This site-specific pathology is endemic; epidemic disease, by contrast, arises from seasonal shifts affecting a whole region. (Pormann (ed.), 2018) The two categories operate by the same environmental logic but at different scales, and the treatise moves between them fluidly.

Disease as Both Divine and Human

One of the most frequently cited passages in the history of Hippocratic thought appears here: that diseases “are all divine and all human — no one being more divine or more human than any other.” Jouanna reads this as the key formulation of Hippocratic rationalism — not a denial of the divine but a redefinition of it. If all diseases are equally divine because all have natural causes, then no disease can be claimed as the special province of religious healers on the grounds that it is “sacred.” (Jouanna, 1999) The formula sets up the more famous polemic in On the Sacred Disease and links Airs, Waters, Places directly to that companion work.

The Rejection of Contagion

A position implicit throughout the treatise has consequences for the next two thousand years of epidemic medicine: the explicit rejection of person-to-person infectious transmission. The Hippocratic texts attribute epidemic disease not to contagion but to environmental factors — shared air, water, climate, and season — affecting all inhabitants of a region simultaneously. (Pormann (ed.), 2018) This was not oversight: the environmental framework was positively committed to the idea that disease arises from shared external conditions rather than from something passed between individuals.

That commitment had lasting consequences. Pre-germ-theory epidemic medicine, for over two millennia, worked within a framework that explained disease geographically and meteorologically rather than biologically. (Pormann (ed.), 2018) The miasma theory of the nineteenth century — the dominant explanation for epidemic disease before Koch and Pasteur — is a direct descendant of this environmental logic, and the eventual germ-theory revolution was not merely a substitution of frameworks but the overturning of a way of thinking whose authority derived in part from this Hippocratic root.

Medical Climatology

Astronomy and Medicine

One of the more striking claims in the text is the author’s insistence that astronomy is not a marginal topic for medicine but a core one. Jouanna notes that the author declared “the contribution of astronomy to medicine is not a very small one but a very great one indeed” — a claim remarkable in itself, but doubly so because it appears to be the first recorded use of the word astronomie in surviving Greek literature. The term, coined or adopted here, enters written record in a medical context. (Jouanna, 1999) The observation of star-risings and star-settings was the ancient physician’s calendar, marking the transitions between seasons that brought or ended particular disease conditions.

This integration of celestial observation into medical practice is not mysticism. The author uses star-risings as a calendar: when Arcturus rises, summer is ending; when the Pleiades set, winter is coming. These transitions are when epidemic change is most likely. The physician who tracks them has advance warning.

Environmental Moderation and the Healthy Year

The treatise articulates a theory of the healthy and unhealthy year. The healthiest year is one of seasonal moderation — metriotis — in which winters are neither abnormally mild nor violently cold, spring rains arrive at the expected time, and summers do not become extreme. (Jouanna, 1999) The primary danger to health is not any particular climate but sudden, violent change (metabole): a hot summer that breaks without warning into cold, a spring that produces unexpected frost.

Jouanna has analyzed the conceptual architecture of this argument carefully. The vocabulary of metriotis and its opposite — excess, hybris — is borrowed from the Greek moral tradition. In ethics, the virtuous person avoids excess; in medicine, the dangerous year is one of climatic excess. The author is naturalizing a moral vocabulary, giving what had been an ethical concept a physiological, mechanistic basis. (Jouanna, 1999) This move is representative of a broader Hippocratic strategy: displacing supernatural and moral explanations for disease with natural, observable ones.

Ethnography and Environmental Determinism

The Asian–European Comparison

The second half of the treatise pivots from the physician’s practical toolkit to comparative ethnography. The author compares the peoples of Asia and Europe, and the comparison is systematically unfavorable to Asia. Asiatic peoples, living in moderate, uniform climates that lack the violent seasonal contrasts of Europe, are physically larger and better nourished, but softer, less martial, and more inclined toward submission. Europeans, hardened by climatic extremity and seasonal unpredictability, are fiercer, more independent, and more suited to self-governance.

Jouanna summarizes the mechanism: climate shapes constitution; constitution shapes character; character shapes political disposition. The environmental determinism is explicit, and the author deploys it to explain not merely why people look different in different places but why some peoples are suited to govern themselves while others are not. (Jouanna, 1999) This is environmental explanation functioning as political theory.

The principle generalizes beyond human populations. The text’s argument that the variability of seasons produces a corresponding variety of physiques extends, in Aer. 13, to an explicit landscape analogy: the bodies of people from variable climates differ from one another as wooded mountains differ from level plains. Aristotle absorbed this argument directly. His account in Hist. an. 7(8).29 of the pigs of Mount Athos — that mountainous and rugged places produce wilder, fiercer characters even in swine, with Athos sows fierce enough to face lowland boars — relies on language so close to Aer. 24 that coincidence is difficult to maintain. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The causal logic passes essentially intact from the medical text into Aristotle’s natural history.

Aristotle’s Politics 7.7 extends the comparison to its most famous political form. The inhabited world divides into three regions: the nations of cold Europe are full of spirit but deficient in intelligence and skill, remaining free but unable to govern their neighbors; Asians are intelligent and skilled in the crafts but lack spirit, hence enslaved; Greeks alone, occupying the intermediate region, share in both qualities and are therefore capable of ruling all others if unified under one constitution. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) This tripartition draws heavily on the Hippocratic framework even while departing from it.

The passage contrasting Asiatic despotism with Greek freedom became one of the most politically charged sections of the Hippocratic Corpus. The story of Hippocrates’ refusal of barbarian gold — a later biographical legend — was regularly cited alongside this passage, with both understood as Hippocrates’ principled rejection of the despotism that AWP diagnosed as a product of Asia’s enervating climate. (Pormann (ed.), 2018)

The Scythians and the Fertility Argument

Among the detailed ethnographic passages, the treatment of Scythian women is particularly striking. The author observes that free Scythian women are less fertile than slave Scythian women, and attributes the difference to way of life rather than to nature: sedentary, well-fed free women are less hospitable to conception than active, leaner slave women. (Jouanna, 1999) The argument explicitly resists constitutional determinism in the local case — it is behavior, not innate nature, that explains the fertility differential — which sits in productive tension with the broader environmental determinism of the text.

The treatise also notes, in its account of Greek women more generally, that women in classical Greece declined to consult male physicians for intimate ailments out of modesty — a passage that has attracted attention as a window into the practical obstacles facing Hippocratic medicine in gynecological practice. (Jouanna, 1999)

Kuriyama on Wind and the Body

Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body offers a comparative perspective on the environmental medicine of Airs, Waters, Places that cuts against any purely Western genealogy of the tradition. Kuriyama shows that wind was once a fundamental medical category in both Greek and Chinese medical traditions, and that Airs, Waters, Places belongs to a broader ancient world in which the atmosphere was understood as an active causal agent in health and disease. (Kuriyama, Shigehisa, 1999) Greek and Chinese medicine eventually developed fundamentally different wind theories, with the Greek tradition moving toward atmospheric miasma and contagion-by-air while the Chinese tradition developed qi theories of wind as internal pathological force — but the shared starting point matters. (Kuriyama, Shigehisa, 1999)

Kuriyama also analyzes the treatise’s bodily vision: the claim that Europeans, shaped by their variable climate, possess well-articulated, taut bodies, while Asians, softened by uniformity, have unarticulated, slack bodies. (Kuriyama, Shigehisa, 1999) This is environmental determinism written onto the body’s surface, with bodily articulation functioning as a marker of what Kuriyama reads as a distinctly Greek concern with visible structure and musculature as indices of identity. The environmental argument in Airs, Waters, Places is, in this reading, inseparable from a specific aesthetic and political vision of what a proper body looks like.

Influence on Later Thought

Plato, Vitruvius, and the City

The influence of Airs, Waters, Places on non-medical thought is extensive and traceable. Jouanna documents that Plato, in the Laws, advises the lawgiver who must found a new city to take account of the climate, water supply, and orientation of the site — precisely the four factors the Hippocratic text had systematized. (Jouanna, 1999) The same considerations appear in Aristotle’s Politics, where at Pol. 7.11 he explicitly mentions the role of winds, waters, and places, and at 1330b12 apparently paraphrases Airs 7.1 almost verbatim. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The Roman architect Vitruvius, writing in the first century BCE, declared in On Architecture that the architect must understand the part of medicine relating to climate, waters, and places before designing healthy buildings. The text had crossed from medicine into urban planning.

Nutton notes that Herodotus, working in the same period as the probable author of Airs, Waters, Places, employed historical and ethnographic methods that have strong parallels with the Hippocratic Corpus — suggesting that the environmental-comparative mode of inquiry was emerging simultaneously across several genres in fifth-century Greece. (Nutton, 2023)

In the Arabic tradition, Airs, Waters, Places was one of the four Hippocratic works singled out as the core medical curriculum. Ibn Ridwan, the eleventh-century Egyptian physician, records that “the most eminent physicians of Alexandria confined [medical courses] to four of the books of Hippocrates: Aphorisms, Prognostic, Regimen in Acute Diseases, and Airs, Waters, and Places.” (Pormann (ed.), 2018) This Alexandrian canon placed AWP alongside texts concerned primarily with prognosis and treatment, signaling its status as foundational rather than merely theoretical.

Aristotle’s Engagement with Airs, Waters, Places

Aristotle’s reception of the text is among the most consequential and most debated threads in the history of ancient science. Popa (in Bartoš and Linka, 2024) argues that Aristotle’s material-efficient explanatory mechanisms — covering composition, morphology, and temperament — are significantly indebted to the Hippocratic treatise, though he prefers “probable influence” to “direct filiation.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The argument turns on structural resemblance rather than explicit citation: Aristotle was notably reluctant to name his medical sources, but the explanatory patterns he deploys are often strikingly Hippocratic in shape.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Gen. an. 4.2, where Aristotle ties the composition of human bodies directly to the mixture of surrounding air, foods, and especially the water taken in, making nutrition and water content the central material-efficient pathway by which environment shapes constitution. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The logic is continuous with Airs, though the conceptual vocabulary has shifted. Aristotle’s account of food supply as a determinant of animal size likewise echoes this tradition: his observation in Hist. an. 7(8).28 that in Egypt some animals are larger and some smaller than in Greece, with the differences attributed to the abundance or scarcity of food for carnivores versus herbivores, extends environmental analysis into ecological specifics. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The engagement extends from biology into political philosophy. Thein (in Bartoš and Linka, 2024) demonstrates that despite reducing the Hippocratic plurality of climatic factors to temperature alone, and despite inverting the treatise’s association of superior technē with Europe by locating craft skill instead in Asia, Aristotle in Pol. 7.7 was drawing on Airs as his most prominent source. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) The passage functions as an endoxon — an appeal to Hippocratic authority that allows Aristotle to ground his political analysis in recognizable environmental reasoning without pursuing the full biological inquiry that a proper investigation would require. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

Thein identifies a fundamental conceptual inversion between the two texts, however. Where Airs derives the soul from environmental causes acting on bodies, Aristotle operates in the reverse direction, deriving bodily features from psychic capacities, with bodies understood as “naturally attuned” to the soul’s ruling or ruled status. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Yet the practical outcome is similar: both texts treat variation within limits as the optimal condition, and both resist a fixed ethnic mapping. Thein’s conclusion is that what connects Pol. 7.7 and the Airs is precisely the figure of shifting boundaries — outside and within Greece alike — rather than any neat three-region scheme. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The influence of Airs on Aristotle’s environmental biology permeates into his Politics as well as his zoological works, suggesting a single sustained engagement across the Aristotelian corpus rather than isolated borrowings. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) Popa’s overall assessment is that the conceptual and methodological similarities between the treatise and Aristotle’s environmental passages point to major influence, though the extent of Aristotle’s access to the full text rather than to summaries or selections cannot be established with certainty. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024) What Aristotle borrowed, Thein argues, was selected to serve a narrower political agenda: the Hippocratic plurality of explanations, including cultural customs and political constitutions as modifiers of nature, was abandoned in favor of a simpler climatic scheme suited to modeling the ideal city. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024)

The Humoral Connection

The treatise’s physiology is not fully systematized in the later Galenic sense, but it works within a recognizable humoral framework. Nutton identifies phlegm and bile as the two most important humors in the broader Hippocratic Corpus (Nutton, 2023), and the environmental variables of Airs, Waters, Places — moist versus dry climates, cold versus warm seasons, stagnant versus running water — operate by shifting humoral balance. A city of moist marsh air and stagnant water produces phlegmatic constitutions; a city of dry, exposed highland produces bilious ones. The environmental-humoral connection was what allowed the text’s climatology to be integrated into Galenic and later Islamic medicine without requiring theoretical reconstruction.

Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Reception

The Asian/European comparison in Airs, Waters, Places found a sustained second life among European travel writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers visiting Asia Minor, the treatise provided a ready-made explanatory framework: the temperate, uniform climate of the region, producing physically larger but morally softer peoples, explained both the character of the inhabitants and, by extension, the legitimacy of northern European imperial dominance. Pormann documents how following Hippocrates, these writers argued that varied and severe northern climates created the more robust, belligerent races suited for self-governance, while the unchanging warmth of Asia produced the docility and submissiveness that made despotic rule natural there. (Pormann (ed.), 2018) (Pormann (ed.), 2018)

The political reading was not uniformly imperialist, however. The English liberal reformer William Farr read the same passage as an indictment of despotism rather than a justification for conquest. In Farr’s rendering, Hippocrates attributed Asiatic enervation not to irreversible constitutional nature but to political conditions — government by despots. “Independence,” Farr declared, “enlarges, and gives energy to, all the faculties; it is the vital breath of the mind; it gives health to a nation.” (Pormann (ed.), 2018) J. Rutherfurd Russell, writing in 1861, shared this liberal reading: commenting on the passage, he exclaimed “What a noble picture of a free over a slave State!” and connected it to the biographical legend of Hippocrates’ refusal to serve a tyrant — “No wonder that the mind which conceived it should revolt from the idea of serving a tyrant.” (Pormann (ed.), 2018)

The gap between imperialist and liberal uses of the same Hippocratic text illustrates how thoroughly the treatise’s environmental determinism had been absorbed into political argument by the nineteenth century. The same causal structure — climate shapes character shapes political capacity — could serve opposite political conclusions depending on whether the reader emphasized nature or institutions as the source of Asiatic submission.

The “Hippocratic Turn”: Modern Revival

A Century of Suppression

Jackson’s Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine records that a “hundred-year hiatus” in the practical application of Airs, Waters, Places-style thinking occurred as germ theories drove out environmental explanations in the late nineteenth century. The identification of specific microbial causes for specific diseases between 1876 and 1905 made the broad environmental-climatic framework seem scientifically obsolete. Germ theory could explain the epidemic in terms of an identified pathogen; environmental explanations seemed vague and untestable by comparison.

Rosen’s A History of Public Health took a different view. For Rosen, Airs, Waters, and Places was the foundational epidemiological document of antiquity — the first known systematic effort to relate environmental factors to disease — and the tradition it established remained the operative framework for public health practice until the bacteriological revolution. (George Rosen, 1958) (George Rosen, 1958) Rosen’s account treats the hiatus as a loss rather than a correction.

Nineteenth-Century American Frontier Medicine

Even during the bacteriological revolution’s ascendancy, the environmental tradition persisted in particular institutional contexts. Jackson notes that nineteenth-century American frontier medicine regarded the land itself in terms of health and “salubriousness” — whether a settlement was situated in a healthy or unhealthy place was a practical question for surveyors and settlers, answered in terms that would have been recognizable to the author of Airs, Waters, Places.

The Return: Ecological and Environmental Medicine

Jackson identifies the past quarter-century as a “Hippocratic turn” in medical history — a revival of airs-waters-places thinking driven by recognition that germ theory and biomedical reductionism had failed to account for the social, ecological, and environmental determinants of disease. (Jackson (ed.), 2011) The rise of ecological approaches to health, of environmental epidemiology as a research discipline, and of place-based public health practice all represent, in different ways, a return to the structure of inquiry the Hippocratic text had established.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) stands, in Jackson’s account, as a turning point in this recovery: a work that named the contamination of air, water, and land as a systematic threat to health, and that recovered a suppressed Hippocratic sensibility at the moment when chemical pollution had made environmental medicine urgent again. (Jackson (ed.), 2011)

(Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Ultimately, the influence of On Airs, Waters and Places on Aristotle’s biological views about how winds affect pregnancies also permeates into his Politics (Pol.); I discuss this in Leunissen (in progress). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In this chapter, I argue that that it is likely that explanatory mechanisms of this sort are significantly indebted to early medical theories. Aristotle is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to referencing specific medical treatises; this, however, should not prevent us from highlighting features shared with those works and probable influences. I am concerned here with works traditionally included in the Hippocratic Corpus, especially with Airs, Waters, Places (hereafter Aer.), probably written during the closing decades of the fifth century, and where environmental causation plays a central and multifaceted explanatory role. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Also, one region (chōra) differs from another in these respects, and one type of water from another on account of these same causes, for the quality of the nourishment especially and of someone’s bodily condition depends on the blend of the surrounding air (διὰ τε τὴν κρᾶσιν τοῦ περιεστῶτος ἀέρος) and of the foods which the body takes up, and especially on the nourishment supplied by the water, since this is what we take most of, water being present as nourishment in everything, even in solid substances. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In Egypt, whereas the other animals are larger than in Greece, such as the cattle and the sheep, some are smaller, for example wolves and asses and hares and foxes and ravens and hawks, and some are about the same, for example crows and goats. The cause is attributed to (aitiōntai) the food, in that it is unstinted for some but scanty for others such as the wolves and the hawks, and so is the provision for carnivores since the small birds are scanty, and for hares and all that do not eat flesh because neither nuts nor fruit have a long season. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Where the seasons experience the greatest and the most frequent changes, the land too is very wild and very uneven; you will find there many wooded mountains, plains and meadows. But where the seasons do not alter much, the land is very even. So it is too with the people, if you will examine the matter. Some physiques resemble wooded, well-watered mountains, others light, dry land, others marshy meadows, others a plain of bare, parched earth. For the seasons which modify a physical frame differ; if the differences be great, the more too are the differences in the shapes. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Places (topoi) [i.e. different places] also produce differing characters (ēthē), for example mountainous and rugged places (τόποι … ὀρεινοὶ καὶ τραχεῖς) produce characters different from those in level and soft places: even in their appearance they are wilder and fiercer (καὶ γὰρ τὰς ὄψεις ἀγριώτερα καὶ ἀλκιμὠτερα), like the pigs on Mount Athos; for even their sows are too much for the lowland boars to face. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Although likely indebted to Aer., whether directly or indirectly, Aristotle never adheres strictly and solely to its letter, but bolsters his accounts with other sources (other authors or reports by shepherds, farmers, etc.), including his own investigations (e.g., Mete. underlies some of his material explanations in Gen. an. and elsewhere). The extent to which Aristotle was familiar with the text of Aer., roughly as we know it today, and with other texts, like Vict. 1 and 2, is impossible to determine with certainty. Still, the conceptual and methodological similarities between Aer. and numerous passages where Aristotle considers the impact of the habitat, while largely bracketing off final causation, point to a major and stimulating influence on his view of environmental causation and of the defining features of animals. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Schütrumpf also seems to be the first commentator to follow William Newman’s century-old insight that not only Pol. 7.11, 1330a38–b14 mentions the role of winds (a39, b14), waters (b4, b6, b13) and places (b9), but that, at 1330b12, Aristotle apparently paraphrases Airs 7.1 (his πλεῖστον συμβάλλεται πρὸς τὴν ὑγίειαν does indeed seem to mirror the text of the Airs: πλεῖστον γὰρ μέρος ξυμβάλλεται ἐς τὴν ὑγιείην). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The nations in cold regions, particularly in Europe, are full of spirit but are deficient in intelligence and skill (θυμοῦ μέν ἐστι πλήρη, διανοίας δὲ ἐνδεέστερα καὶ τέχνης); which is why they continue to be comparatively free but are apolitical and incapable of ruling their neighbours (τῶν πλησίον ἄρχειν οὐ δυνάμενα). By contrast, those in Asia have intelligent minds and are skilled in the crafts, but they lack spirit (ἄθυμα δέ); which is why they continue to be ruled and enslaved. But as for the race of the Greeks, just as (ὥσπερ) it occupies an intermediate region, so (οὕτως) it shares in both conditions (ἀμφοῖν μετέχει). (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): In contrast to Plato’s Republic, there is no exact correspondence between the number of soul-parts and number of climates. Aristotle introduces two capacities of the soul but three regions, and in doing so reduces climate to temperature alone, presumably as the main factor behind the stated differences. Despite this strong reduction, I believe that the Hippocratic Airs is the most prominent source behind this text. The reason is simple: as I have said already, the passage quoted relies on two and only two capacities of the soul, and while these capacities map only partially onto the bipartition of the soul that Aristotle uses elsewhere in his ethics and politics, they map very well onto the disposition of (at least some of) the inhabitants of Europe and Asia in the Airs. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Most significantly, Aristotle departs from the Airs on two major points: first, he introduces Greece as a third region in addition to Europe and Asia (in this respect, he follows not only Plato, but the tradition first described in Herodotus); second, he switches the relation in respect to technê, since Airs 24.8–9 associates superior technê with Europe, whereas Aristotle finds the crafts more at home in Asia. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): The latter seems to function as an endoxon that echoes Hippocratic authority while allowing Aristotle to avoid digging deeper into the relation between human nature and environmental factors: not to go beyond what is required for discussing the best arrangement of city as a natural habitat for humans as political animals. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Here Aristotle’s perspective is the opposite of what we find in the Hippocratics, insofar as Aristotle, on the conceptual level, derives physical features and properties from the capacities proper to the soul and the intellect: bodies should be naturally attuned to these capacities. However, the conceptual scheme and reality do not always coincide, and we already know that to his claim that nature correlates the bodies and souls of freemen on the one hand, and slaves on the other, Aristotle adds that “the opposite also often occurs.” (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): It is also for this reason that, in Pol. 7.7 no less than in the Hippocratic Airs, we find no solid “Greek” core surrounded by the neatly delimited barbarian regions. Instead, what connects both texts are the shifting boundaries both outside and within Greece. (…) more important to dwell on the fact that, despite the different geographical labels they use, both Pol. 7.7 and the Airs agree that variation within limits is the best condition that can produce a culturally and politically suitable spectrum of natures. (Hynek Bartoš and Vojtěch Linka, 2024): Aristotle has borrowed from the Airs what suits his much narrower aim in Pol. 7, where he elaborates a model of the best city. In this context, Aristotle abandons the plurality of Hippocratic explanations for human variability, in which many factors are considered, including different cultural customs and political constitutions. This point is important, since it confirms that the Hippocratic author does not propound an unidirectional causal scheme, but rather a multiplicity of causal chains where culture can modify nature in its turn, not least by introducing inheritable characteristics, as in the much-quoted case of the Macrocephali (Airs 14).

See Also

• hippocratic-corpus
• nature-of-man
• sacred-disease
• humoral-theory
• miasma-theory
• medical-geography
• environmental-medicine
• hippocrates-of-cos

Sources

Compiled from evidence cards: jouanna99-ch14-001, jouanna99-ch14-003, jouanna99-ch14-004, jouanna99-ch14-005, jouanna99-ch14-006, jouanna99-ch14-007, jouanna99-ch14-009, jouanna99-ch03-008, jouanna99-ch10-002, jouanna99-ch10-003, smi79-ch02-008, smi79-ch02-014, smi79-ch02-017, smi79-ch12-020, kur99-ch03-010, kur99-ch06-001, kur99-ch06-006, jac11-ch25-001, jac11-ch25-007, jac11-ch25-008, jac11-ch25-009, nutton23-ch03-008, nutton23-ch05-003, nutton23-ch05-006, ros58-ch04-003, ros58-ch06-002, bar24-ch07-009, bar24-ch09-002, bar24-ch09-004, bar24-ch09-012, bar24-ch09-013, bar24-ch09-014, bar24-ch09-017, bar24-ch10-002, bar24-ch10-005, bar24-ch10-007, bar24-ch10-008, bar24-ch10-014, bar24-ch10-015, bar24-ch10-016, bar24-ch10-017

Primary sources consulted:

• Jouanna, J. (1999). Hippocrates. Johns Hopkins University Press. — ch. 3, 10, 14
• Smith, W.D. (1979). The Hippocratic Tradition. Cornell University Press. — ch. 2, 12
• Kuriyama, S. (1999). The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. Zone Books. — ch. 3, 6
• Jackson, M., ed. (2011). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine. Oxford University Press. — ch. 25
• Nutton, V. (2023). Ancient Medicine. 3rd ed. Routledge. — ch. 3, 5
• Rosen, G. (1958). A History of Public Health. MD Publications. — ch. 4, 6