The power of torpedo fish as a pathological model to the understanding of nervous transmission in Antiquity.

The torpedo effect was known long before electricity was discovered. How was it explained? In early accounts on the subject, Emil du Bois-Reymond found remarkable observations and hypotheses. In Antiquity, zoological interest is illustrated by Aristotle and followers, who were intrigued by torpedo's behaviour and capacity to act from a distance. Alexandrian physicists were more interested in the propagation, as for light, of its effect in matter, conceived as either corpuscular or continuous. The theory of nervous action is linked to these conceptions and separated in various hypotheses among which that on qualitative alteration. However, the medical approach of toxicology takes over this debate and brings back torpedo's property in the frame of pathology.

Theophrastus' biological opuscula and the Hippocratic Corpus: a critical dialogue?

Recent work on Theophrastus' biological opuscula opens new perspectives on the still obscure relations between this author and the Hippocratic writings. The three short treatises On Fatigue, On Sweat, On Dizziness, present unquestionable resemblances with many Hippocratic notions, but still more differences from them. This suggests a possible critical dialogue, using allusions to, and substitutions from, certain Hippocratic writings such as Regimen. Reading such writings in the light of the Theophrastean material reveals in them such important themes as differences and causes, which coincide with Theophrastus' own epistemological interests and which may have played some role in his research.