ABSTRACT

One of the most challenging issues with the sources of ancient medicine is to be able to identify the correspondence between the diseases we know today and those reported in ancient medical texts. Ancient diseases’ de nitions rarely help us, and the symptoms described often correspond to more than one disease. This is especially true about tubercu- losis, a disease that historians of medicine habitually associates with the Greek words phthi(n) o (φθίνω), verb, phthisis/phthoe (φθίσις/φθόη), noun, phthinodes/phthisikos (φθινώδης/ φθισικός), adjective, all etymologically linked to an Indo-European root that expresses the idea of consumption in a broad sense. This article aims to analyze a group of Greek words, branchos/branchia (βράγχος/βράγχια), krauros/kraurao (κραῦρος/κραυράω), and katarreo (καταρρέω), that appear in nosological contexts very close to the infectious disease that today we call tuberculosis. Moreover, the paper aims to focus on the transmission pathways of TB being via animal-human contact and some ancient strategies to cure it. The symptoms, transmission pathways and therapeutic approach of tuberculosis belong to a homogeneous pathological picture that emerges from a set of texts that date back to the period between the fth century BC and the second century AD.