Pain and the Body in Corpus Hippocraticum: A Distributional Semantic Analysis

Abstract

The authors of the medical treatises collected in Corpus Hippocraticum often mention pain, its qualities and origin. At the same time, however, they do not provide any explicit definition or theory of pain, of its nature and of its relation to other important aspects of Hippocratic medicine. Moreover, they employ at least four word families which are commonly suggested to denote pain in ancient Greek. This encourages modern researchers to ask how do these four pain words semantically differ and to what extent are they based on a shared notion of pain. In this article, we attempt to answer these questions by analyzing the corpus by means of several computational text analysis methods, especially by employing a distributional semantic modeling approach. Our results reveal a close association between some of these pain words, bodily parts and pathological states. The results are further compared with findings obtained by means of traditional close reading of the sources.