CLAS 3239 | Ancient Medicine: The Classical Roots of the Medical Humanities: E-books, Articles, and Online Reference

Examining all forms of healing within the specific socioeconomic and environmental constraints of the Ptolemies Egypt, this book explores how linguistic, cultural and ethnic affiliations and interactions were expressed in the medical domain."

This collection of papers studies the Hippocratic writings in their relationship to the intellectual, social, cultural and literary context in which they were written. Context' includes not only the Greek world, but also the medical thought and practice of other civilisations in the Mediterranean, such as Babylonian and Egyptian medicine. A further point of interest are the relations between the Hippocratic writings and non-Hippocratic' medical authors of the fifth and fourth century BCE, such as Diocles of Carystus, Praxagoras of Cos, as well as Plato, Aristotle and Theophrastus. The collection further includes studies of some of the less well-known works in the Hippocratic Corpus, such as Internal Affections, On the Eye, and Prorrheticon. And finally, a number of papers are devoted to the impact and reception of Hippocratic thought in later antiquity and the early modern period.

This book demonstrates the importance of Greek medical thought in the work of Euripides. The first part of the book argues for the significance of the healing figure in Euripidean drama, while the second part analyzes the role of traditional and rationalist healing strategies in the construction of Euripidean plots and arguments. The work will be of interest to those pursuing studies in Greek drama, Greek intellectual history and Greek medicine.

The "Huang Di nei jing su wen, " known familiarly as the "Su wen, " is a seminal text of ancient Chinese medicine, yet until now there has been no comprehensive, detailed analysis of its development and contents. At last Paul U. Unschuld offers entry into this still-vital artifact of China's cultural and intellectual past. Unschuld traces the history of the "Su wen" to its origins in the final centuries B.C.E., when numerous authors wrote short medical essays to explain the foundations of human health and illness on the basis of the newly developed vessel theory. He examines the meaning of the title and the way the work has been received throughout Chinese medical history, both before and after the eleventh century when the text as it is known today emerged. Unschuld's survey of the contents includes illuminating discussions of the yin-yang and five-agents doctrines, the perception of the human body and its organs, qi and blood, pathogenic agents, concepts of disease and diagnosis, and a variety of therapies, including the new technique of acupuncture. An extensive appendix, furthermore, offers a detailed introduction to the complicated climatological theories of "Wu yun liu qi "("five periods and six qi"), which were added to the "Su wen" by Wang Bing in the Tang era. In an epilogue, Unschuld writes about the break with tradition and innovative style of thought represented by the "Su wen." For the first time, health care took the form of "medicine," in that it focused on environmental conditions, climatic agents, and behavior as causal in the emergence of disease and on the importance of natural laws in explaining illness. Unschuld points out that much of what we surmise about the human organism is simply a projection, reflecting dominant values and social goals, and he constructs a hypothesis to explain the formation and acceptance of basic notions of health and disease in a given society. Reading the "Su wen, " he says, not only offers a better understanding of the roots of Chinese medicine as an integrated aspect of Chinese civilization; it also provides a much needed starting point for discussions of the differences and parallels between European and Chinese ways of dealing with illness and the risk of early death.

The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sôma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature. By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self. The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject.

This monograph offers a study of the inter-relations between medicine, religion, and literature in the Sacred Tales of the Second Century CE Greek scholar Aelius Aristides.