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Dr Entralgo is Professor of the history of medicine at Madrid University. His book deals with a highly interesting phase of that history taking place in ancient Greece, where magic is progressively resolved into rationality. One outcome was the school of Hippocrates which concentrates on the study and physical treatment of the body, rejecting all earlier practices as superstition. Western medicine is based on the empiricism of the Hippocratic school and continued to limit its scope to the treatment of the body at the expense of the soul. The introduction of psychiatry and the various schools of psychotherapy have only recently corrected this onesided orientation.
The main part of Entralgo's book explores that more ancient trend in the art of healing which was rejected by the Hippocratic school, and which he calls ‘the therapy of the word’. By this is meant that speech addressed to the sick acts by itself in improving or curing his condition. Entralgo delineates the development of ‘verbal therapy’ from pre-Homeric times to the Sophists, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Magical in origin, it absorbed more and more rational elements without completely losing its original connection with the irrational, or rather with the domain of religion. The author's profound analysis of the cathartic function of Greek tragedy is worth noting in this respect.
In the reviewer's opinion the real object of this study is the mana of the word. This term, not used by the author, seems preferable to ‘therapy’ in expressing the numinous quality of verbal utterance characteristic of primitive mentality. The therapeutic application of the spoken word is only one of its magic properties. In primitive society religion and healing are indistinguishable; it is the merit of the Hippocratic school to have made them independent. The inclusion of healing in religious practices rests firstly on the