Popular Medicine in Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Explorations PDF Download

Author: William V. Harris
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004326049
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
The history of healthcare in the classical world suffers from notable neglect in one crucial area. While scholars have intensively studied both the rationalistic medicine that is conveyed in the canonical texts and also the ‘temple medicine’ of Asclepius and other gods, they have largely neglected to study popular medicine in a systematic fashion. This volume, which for the most part is the fruit of a conference held at Columbia University in 2014, aims to help correct this imbalance. Using the full range of available evidence - archaeological, epigraphical and papyrological, as well as the literary texts - the international cast of contributors hopes to show what real people in Antiquity actually did when they tried to avert illness or cure it.

Author: Rebecca Flemming
Publisher: Classical Press of Wales
ISBN: 191058990X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
For almost half a century, Vivian Nutton has been a leading figure in the study of ancient (and less ancient) medicine. The field itself has been revolutionised over that time. In this volume distinguished colleagues and former students develop, in his honour, key themes of his ground-breaking scholarship. Spanning from the Bronze Age to the Digital Age, involving the cult of Artemis and the corpuscular theories of Asclepiades of Bithynia, the medicinal uses of beavers and the cost of health-care and wet-nursing, case-histories, remedy exchange and the medical repercussions of political assassination, this book has at its centre the pluralism and diversity of the ancient medical marketplace. The lively interplay between choice and competition, unity and division, communication and debate, so notable in Vivian Nutton's foundational vision of the world of classical medicine, is richly examined across these pages.

Author: Christopher D. Stanley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567696561
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
What role did offers of physical healing (or the hope of receiving it) play in the missionary program of the apostle Paul? What did he do to treat the many illnesses and injuries that he endured while pursuing his mission? What did he advise his followers to do regarding their health problems? Such questions have been broadly neglected in studies of Paul and his churches, but Christopher D. Stanley shows how vital they truly become once we recognize how thoroughly “pagan” religion was implicated in all aspects of Greco-Roman health care. What did Paul approve, and what did he reject? Given Paul's silence on these subjects, Stanley relies on a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to develop informed judgments about what Paul might have thought, said, and done with regard to his own and his followers' health care. He begins by exploring the nature and extent of sickness in the Roman world and the four overlapping health care systems that were available to Paul and his followers: home remedies, “magical” treatments, religious healing, and medical care. He then examines how Judeans and Christians in the centuries before and after Paul viewed and engaged with these systems. Finally, he speculates on what kinds of treatments Paul might have approved or rejected and whether he might have used promises of healing to attract people to his movement. The result is a thorough and nuanced analysis of a vital dimension of Greco-Roman social life and Paul's place within it.

Author: Jason Sion Mokhtarian
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520384040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Despite the Talmud being the richest repository of medical remedies in ancient Judaism, this important strain of Jewish thought has been largely ignored—even as the study of ancient medicine has exploded in recent years. In a comprehensive study of this topic, Jason Sion Mokhtarian recuperates this obscure genre of Talmudic text, which has been marginalized in the Jewish tradition since the Middle Ages, to reveal the unexpected depth of the rabbis’ medical knowledge. Medicine in the Talmud argues that these therapies represent a form of rabbinic scientific rationality that relied on human observation and the use of nature while downplaying the role of God and the Torah in health and illness. Drawing from a wide range of both Jewish and Sasanian sources—from the Bible, the Talmud, and Maimonides to texts written in Akkadian, Syriac, and Mandaic, as well as the incantation bowls—Mokhtarian offers rare insight into how the rabbis of late antique Babylonia adapted the medical knowledge of their time to address the needs of their community. In the process, he narrates an untold chapter in the history of ancient medicine.

Author: George Kazantzidis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110660474
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The present volume offers a systematic discussion of the complex relationship between medicine and paradoxography in the ancient world. For a long time, the relationship between the two has been assumed to be virtually non-existent. Paradoxography is concerned with disclosing a world full of marvels and wondrous occurrences without providing an answer as to how these phenomena can be explained. Its main aim is to astonish and leave its readers bewildered and confused. By contrast, medicine is committed to the rational explanation of human phusis, which makes it, in a number of significant ways, incompatible with thauma. This volume moves beyond the binary opposition between ‘rational’ and ‘non-rational’ modes of thinking, by focusing on instances in which the paradox is construed with direct reference to established medical sources and beliefs or, inversely, on cases in which medical discourse allows space for wonder and admiration. Its aim is to show that thauma, rather than present a barrier, functions as a concept which effectively allows for the dialogue between medicine and paradoxography in the ancient world.

Author: Petros Bouras-Vallianatos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429892519
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book offers new insights into a largely understudied group of Greek texts preserved in selected manuscripts from the Library at Wellcome Collection, London. The content of these manuscripts ranges from medicine, including theories on diagnosis and treatment of disease, to astronomy, philosophy, and poetry. With texts dating from the ancient era to the Byzantine and Ottoman worlds, each manuscript provides its own unique story, opening a window onto different social and cultural milieus. All chapters are illustrated with black and white and colour figures, highlighting some of the most significant codices in the collection.

Author: Colin Elliott
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691220697
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A wide-ranging and dramatic account of the Antonine plague, the mysterious disease that struck the Roman Empire at its pinnacle In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, now known as the Antonine plague, may have been history’s first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empire began its downward trajectory toward decline and fall. In Pox Romana, historian Colin Elliott offers a comprehensive, wide-ranging account of this pivotal moment in Roman history. Did a single disease—its origins and diagnosis still a mystery—bring Rome to its knees? Carefully examining all the available evidence, Elliott shows that Rome’s problems were more insidious. Years before the pandemic, the thin veneer of Roman peace and prosperity had begun to crack: the economy was sluggish, the military found itself bogged down in the Balkans and the Middle East, food insecurity led to riots and mass migration, and persecution of Christians intensified. The pandemic exposed the crumbling foundations of a doomed Empire. Arguing that the disease was both cause and effect of Rome’s fall, Elliott describes the plague’s “preexisting conditions” (Rome’s multiple economic, social, and environmental susceptibilities); recounts the history of the outbreak itself through the experiences of physician, victim, and political operator; and explores postpandemic crises. The pandemic’s most transformative power, Elliott suggests, may have been its lingering presence as a threat both real and perceived.

Author: Jörg Rüpke
Publisher: Kohlhammer Verlag
ISBN: 3170292250
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The Roman Empire was home to a fascinating variety of different cults and religions. Its enormous extent, the absence of a precisely definable state religion and constant exchanges with the religions and cults of conquered peoples and of neighbouring cultures resulted in a multifaceted diversity of religious convictions and practices. This volume provides a compelling view of central aspects of cult and religion in the Roman Empire, among them the distinction between public and private cult, the complex interrelations between different religious traditions, their mutually entangled developments and expansions, and the diversity of regional differences, rituals, religious texts and artefacts.

Author: Myrto Garani
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199328382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 649

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Book Description
"Several decades of scholarship by now have demonstrated that Roman thinkers have developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together, they offer a range of perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right. This collection of essays pursues a maximally inclusive approach, covering not only authors such as Augustine, but also poets or historians. It pays attention to the mode in which these works were written (giving rhetoric too its due) and their often conscious reflections on the process of translating, or transferring Greek ideas to Roman contexts"--

Author: Colin Webster
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226828778
Category : Human body (Philosophy)
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
"Medicine is itself a type of technology, involving therapeutic tools and substances, and so one way to write the history of medicine is as the application of different technologies to the human body. In Tools and the Organism, Colin Webster argues that, over the course of antiquity, notions shifted about what type of object a body is, what substances constitute its essential nature, and how its parts interact. By following these changes and taking the question of technology into the heart of Greek and Roman medicine, Webster reveals how the body was first conceptualized as an "organism"-a functional object whose inner parts were tools [organa] that each completed certain vital tasks. Webster's approach provides both an overarching survey of the ways that technologies impacted notions of corporeality and corporeal behaviors and, at the same time, stays attentive to the specific material details of ancient tools and how they informed assumptions about somatic structures, substances, and inner processes. For example, by turning to developments in water-delivery technologies and pneumatic tools, we see how these changing material realities altered theories of the vascular system and respiration across Classical antiquity. Tools and the Organism makes the compelling case for why telling the history of ancient Greco-Roman medical theories, from the Hippocratics to Galen, should pay close attention to the question of technology. Selling points: Tour de force survey of ancient medicine First book to demonstrate how the body got its "organs" and what this has to do with ancient technologies For anyone interested in ancient culture, science, medicine, and technology"--