Seasons and Human Health in the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, and Places and Hesiod's Works and Days

This essay focuses on the doctor’s knowledge of seasonal patterns and their impact on human health in the Hippocratic Waters, Airs, and Places. Knowledge of the seasonal factor requires the doctor to master the general and the particular, to take the yearly period and scan it in two bi-seasonal periods with focus on summer and winter as the expected times for the outbreak of the diseases. Such looking-forward analytical operation is inscribed in the doctor’s capacity for pronoia. Due parallels are drawn between the doctor and the seer, on the one hand, and the Presocratic philosopher, on the other. Attention is also given to the early description of winter in Hesiod’s Works and Days: with its detrimental effects on human (and animal) bodies, it emerges as a poetic antecedent of the Hippocratic doctor’s knowledge.