“Let food be thy medicine.” It’s a phrase you may have seen across health- and food-related books and websites, making the case that the Greek author Hippocrates (perhaps best known for a certain oath) was the world’s first dietician. Hippocrates’s comments have led to entire programs of food and drink, as well as a 1983 cookbook touting his ethos.
But what if Hippocrates is far more misunderstood than we might want to believe? Writing at Literary Hub, Helen Morales makes that very argument. Morales is a classicist, and the author of the book Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. She has issues with how Hippocrates has been portrayed — notably, with how some of his quotes have been taken as evidence of his disapproval of people for being fat.
As befits someone with Morales’s areas of expertise, she chalks some of this up to translations that haven’t quite captured the nuances of Hippocrates’s language. To wit:
In ancient Greece, fat in general terms often had positive connotations of richness, prosperity, and thriving, while thin often suggested poverty and weakness. Some uncertainty is caused by the difficulties of translating from ancient Greek into English. The Greek adjective pachus, which is often translated as “fat,” can also mean “stout” and “stocky.” It could also suggest heft, both physically and socially, which our word fat does not.
Morales doesn’t take issue with the fact that Hippocrates has been misunderstood as much as she does with the specific ways in which that misunderstanding has taken place. “The distortion of Hippocrates bothers me because his writings are being conscripted by the diet industry to promote misery and sickness,” she writes. In her observations on these writings, Morales makes a convincing case.
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