Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece: From Antiquity to the Present

Steven M. Oberhelman, editor. Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece: From An- tiquity to the Present. Surrey, England/Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2013. 341 pp. Cloth £70/$119.95.

Dreams are a part of everyone's life. We try to interpret them, we try to control them, and we sometimes base important life decisions on them. Moreover, there is good ev- idence that we have been doing all of these things for a very long time. The authors of the articles in Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece chronicle such efforts among Greeks going back several thousand years. From early on, Greeks were not only con- cerned with dreams, but fortunately for subsequent generations, they wrote a great deal about dreams and their putative meanings. Dozens of sources are cited in these articles, attesting to the interest in dreams from early times to the present.

Several themes emerge from these articles. Perhaps the most significant is the connection between dreams and health. Scattered all over the eastern Mediterranean were dozens of healing sites called Aesclepieia (after Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of medicine and healing) where people would go to find cures for various maladies. Dreams and the interpretation thereof played a prominent role in the diagnosis and treatment of virtually every ailment, both physical and psychological.

From the earliest times for which we have records, close links between dreams, dis- ease, and healing were clearly established. It is the multifarious ways in which these links were made and exploited that comprise most of the material in this volume. Such seminal figures as Hippocrates and Galen employed dream interpretation and dream therapy in their treatment of virtually all diseases. Inducing dreams and interpreting them were central features of their diagnoses and praxis. All of this is skillfully illuminated here by an international collection of scholars with true expertise on the subject.

Antiquity

Maithe Hulskamp considers the outlook on dreams of such figures as the Hippocratics and Galen, arguing that some ignored dream contents and focused only on dream types for the sole purpose of diagnosis, whereas others used dreams for both medical diagnosis and prognosis. She also maintains that Galen put less stock in dreams than most scholars believe.

Louise Cillers and François Pieter Retief distinguish between two types...