Giulia Ecca is the winner of a grant of the Rita Levi Montalcini Ministerial Programme designed to attract top Italian scholars back to Italy. As of November 1, she is now working at the Sapienza Department of Classics. The researchers will work on a project entitled “Ancient Codes of Medical Ethics” and dedicated to analyzing medical ethics and deontology in Ancient Greece and Rome.

Based on a rigorous and analytical analysis of four treatises included in the Corpus Hippocraticum (De medico, De decenti habitu, Praecepta and Testamentum), the research project aims to reconstruct the fundamental aspects of the ethics that governed relations between patients and doctors in classic times. 

The innovative character of the project resides in the advanced philological investigation together with a historical interpretation of the fundamental texts, which – to date – have not been sufficiently addressed by scholars. In order to understand the historical-cultural context in which the texts were developed, research will be conducted not only on the ancient literary sources, but also on epigraphic sources. Moreover, the Hippocratic texts on ethics will be analysed on a diachronic level with the history of medical ethics and compared to Latin texts from the late classic period and high middle ages that appear to contain similarities.