This book offers a fresh examination of the experimental nature of persuasion in the ancient Greek Hippocratic medical treatises, which are among the first examples of 'scientific' explanatory writing composed for oral dissemination in an age in which there are few precedents for prose treatises. Analysis of the persuasive features of Hippocratic prose treatises reveals recognisable signs of 'scientific' reasoning - such as reference to evidence, proof and logical validity. Often obscured, however, in current discussions of proto-scientific prose are the presence and significance of stylistic...