Medical Traditions
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Edited by:
Alain Touwaide
The series Medical Traditions is devoted to the transmission of medicine in handwritten form throughout world history. Medical traditions result from the codification and relaying of knowledge gained, in most cases, through a centuries-long practice, and are typically attested by an abundant textual corpus spanning a vast geographical area, and equally vast period of time. Medicine is understood here in its broadest sense, with the multiple components that contributed to the healthcare of populations.
Monographs and collective volumes in the series will trace the many extant witnesses of relevant texts and reconstruct their linkages, provide critical editions or diplomatic transcriptions of significant works, or address such themes as the written codification of practical knowledge, the transformation mechanisms at work in the written transmission process, the circulation of information within and between groups, translations and their possible adaptations to local realities, the transition from writing to printing, or the historiography of medical traditions studies.
Medical Traditions publishes original works resulting from innovative, cross-disciplinary research aimed at providing both primary data for further developments and new insights on any facet of the complex process of conveying medical knowledge. It is overseen by an international scientific board, bringing together specialists from different disciplines involved in the study of textual and medical traditions.
Series Editor:
Alain Touwaide, Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, Washington, DC, and The Huntington, San Marino, CA, USA.
A historian of medical texts from Antiquity to the 20th century, with a particular focus on the Mediterranean, Alain Touwaide explores the processes at play in the transmission of written records of medical practice and medical information across centuries, with a special attention to trans-cultural exchanges.
Scientific Committee:
Michael Friedrich, Professor, Department of Chinese Studies and Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, specializes in intellectual history, manuscript studies, and the European reception of Chinese culture.
Jost Gippert, Senior Professor, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, investigates the history and diachrony of ancient and less-studied modern languages with a special view on the material basis of their transmission.
Marilena Maniaci, Professor of Manuscript Studies, Università degli studi di Cassino e del Lazio meridionale, studies the history of Greek and Latin book materials and techniques, and methods of analysis and description of medieval manuscripts.
Paolo Odorico, Director of Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociale, Paris, is a Byzantinist with interests in history and sociology of literature in Byzantium. He has published critical editions of Byzantine texts and post-byzantine archives.
Steve M. Oberhelman, Professor of Classics and George Sumey Chair in Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University, College Station, works on Hellenistic and Byzantine Greek cultural and social history, with a special emphasis on dream texts, dreams in medicine, and practical healing manuals in the nineteen and early twentieth centuries.
Dominik Wujastyk, Professor and Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, is interested in the history of Indian medicine and science, the history of Sanskrit grammar, Indian miniature painting, and the study and preservation of Sanskrit manuscripts.
This book will follow the history of wax modelling (or ceroplastics) with its changing fate through the centuries and artistic taste.
Re-discovered in the 13th – 14th centuries in Florence with the cult of votive offerings, the art of wax modelling has an ancient origin. It reached its artistic peak during the Renaissance when it was considered the material par excellence for the representation of portraits, sketches and funeral masks. With the advent of Neoclassicism, ceroplastics, now deemed artistically unpleasant, survived in a scientific environment, where it flourished in the study of normal and pathological anatomy, obstetrics, zoology and botany.
Changes in taste transformed the status of wax reproductions through history. As a rich and complex medium, wax lends itself in a very natural way to reproductions of the human body. Hyperrealism is most evident in moulages, a technique widely used as early as the Renaissance that consisted of making cast of the object to be reproduced in wax. The uncanny response to the notion of the double, condemned by art historians, became a positive and eagerly sought-after feature in the case of later scientific collections where the reproduction had to look exactly like the original.
The essays examine how the study of facial features or expressions as indicative of character or ethnicity, has evolved from the crossroad of magic, religion and primitive medicine to present-day cultural concern for wellness and beauty. In this context, the discoveries of cranio-facial neurophysiology and psychology and the practice of cosmetic and reconstructive surgery have a centuries-old relationship with physiognomy. As the study of outward appearances evolved from its classical roots and self-representations through 18th- and 19th-century adaptations in fiction and travelogues, it gradually became a scientific discipline. Along the way, physiognomy was associated with phrenology and craniology and promoted eugenic policies. Tainted with racial bigotry and biological determinism, it was trapped within questions of delinquency, monstrosity and posthumanism. Throughout its history, physiognomy played both positive and negative roles in the evolution of significant aspects of the socio-cultural order in the West that merit update and in-depth study. The contributions follow a chronological and intertwining sequence to encompass physiognomic expressions in art, literature, spirituality, science, philosophy and cultural studies.
This volume offers a new critical edition with facing English translation and a detailed study of the medieval manual of dietetics Occitan Health Advice dating from the 13th century and probably compiled in the milieu of Montpellier’s university. This Advice on health and well-being is a unique example of medical writing: composed in Occitan (formerly called Old Provençal), the vernacular language of southern France; it provided a wealth of medical information and guidance for a literate nonspecialist reader interested in a healthful life. This Advice will interest medical historians, literary scholars, and linguists, as well as readers curious about the Middle Ages, for all of whom it provides invaluable information on medieval daily life, dietary regimen, and healthy habits.
In 1583 the Italian botanist and physician Andrea Cesalpino (1524–1603) published De Plantis Libri XVI, made of 16 books (libri), considered to be the first treatise where botany is treated independently from medicine. In so doing, he broke with a long tradition inherited in Western science from Antiquity and perpetuated during the Middle Age through the early Renaissance. De Plantis lays the foundations of scientific systematics through a new focus on plant morphology and natural similarities and became a milestone in the history of Western botany. It is a precious testimony to the evolution of botanical and physiological knowledge in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and illustrates the role of Aristotelian philosophy in 16th-century knowledge. The volume includes an introductory essay about Cesalpino's philosophy and botany, a critical edition of the Latin text, a translation, a commentary, and indexes. It should interest scholars in Renaissance studies, historians, and philosophers of science and medicine, as well as botanists and plant scientists curious about the history of plant sciences.
In the pre-modern times, while medicine was still relying on classical authorities on herbal remedies, a new engagement with the plant world emerged. This volume follows intertwined strands in the study of plants, examining newly introduced species that captured physicians' curiosity, expanded their therapeutic arsenal, and challenged their long-held medical theories. The development of herbaria, the creation of botanical gardens, and the inspection of plants contributed to a new understanding of the vegetal world. Increased attention to plants led to account for their therapeutic virtues, to test and produce new drugs, to recognize the physical properties of plants, and to develop a new plant science and medicine.
Medical Humanities may be broadly conceptualized as a discipline wherein medicine and its specialties intersect with those of the humanities and social sciences. As such it is a hybrid area of study where the impact of disease and healing science on culture is assessed and expressed in the particular language of the disciplines concerned with the human experience. However, as much as at first sight this definition appears to be clear, it does not reflect how the interaction of medicine with the humanities has evolved to become a separate field of study. In this publication we have explored, through the analysis of a group of selected multidisciplinary essays, the dynamics of this process. The essays predominantly address the interaction of literature, philosophy, art, art history, ethics, and education with medicine and its specialties from the classical period to the present. Particular attention has been given to the Medieval, Early Modern, and Enlightenment periods. To avoid a rigid compartmentalization of the book based on individual fields of study we opted for a fluid division into multidisciplinary sections, reflective of the complex interactions of the included works with medicine.
This three-volume set of essays is dedicated to Alain Touwaide, known for his far-reaching investigations in fields such as ancient medicine, botany, pharmacy, texts and manuscripts, the classical tradition, translation, the history of science, ethnopharmacology, and plant therapies. The essays, penned by 80 international scholars and researchers and written in six languages, are grouped into three broad categories—Manuscripts, Plants, and Remedies—to reflect Alain’s main areas of research. Each category is broken into subgroups, such as manuscripts, texts, and science; botany; gardens, materia medica, pharmacy, drugs, archaeology, medical traditions, and continuity of scientific knowledge in the East and West. The papers reach across many fields of scholarship, science, and medicine and are, necessarily and fundamentally, trans-disciplinary, trans-chronological, and trans-geographic. These volumes are not so much a Festschrift as an approach to Alain’s work through many disciplines and methods, a discussion of the current status of each field, and an opening into new perspectives.
This three-volume set of essays is dedicated to Alain Touwaide, known for his far-reaching investigations in fields such as ancient medicine, botany, pharmacy, texts and manuscripts, the classical tradition, translation, the history of science, ethnopharmacology, and plant therapies. The essays, penned by 80 international scholars and researchers and written in six languages, are grouped into three broad categories—Manuscripts, Plants, and Remedies—to reflect Alain’s main areas of research. Each category is broken into subgroups, such as manuscripts, texts, and science; botany; gardens, materia medica, pharmacy, drugs, archaeology, medical traditions, and continuity of scientific knowledge in the East and West. The papers reach across many fields of scholarship, science, and medicine and are, necessarily and fundamentally, trans-disciplinary, trans-chronological, and trans-geographic. These volumes are not so much a Festschrift as an approach to Alain’s work through many disciplines and methods, a discussion of the current status of each field, and an opening into new perspectives.
This three-volume set of essays is dedicated to Alain Touwaide, known for his far-reaching investigations in fields such as ancient medicine, botany, pharmacy, texts and manuscripts, the classical tradition, translation, the history of science, ethnopharmacology, and plant therapies. The essays, penned by 80 international scholars and researchers and written in six languages, are grouped into three broad categories—Manuscripts, Plants, and Remedies—to reflect Alain’s main areas of research. Each category is broken into subgroups, such as manuscripts, texts, and science; botany; gardens, materia medica, pharmacy, drugs, archaeology, medical traditions, and continuity of scientific knowledge in the East and West. The papers reach across many fields of scholarship, science, and medicine and are, necessarily and fundamentally, trans-disciplinary, trans-chronological, and trans-geographic. These volumes are not so much a Festschrift as an approach to Alain’s work through many disciplines and methods, a discussion of the current status of each field, and an opening into new perspectives.
This three-volume set of essays is dedicated to Alain Touwaide, known for his far-reaching investigations in fields such as ancient medicine, botany, pharmacy, texts and manuscripts, the classical tradition, translation, the history of science, ethnopharmacology, and plant therapies. The essays, penned by 80 international scholars and researchers and written in six languages, are grouped into three broad categories—Manuscripts, Plants, and Remedies—to reflect Alain’s main areas of research. Each category is broken into subgroups, such as manuscripts, texts, and science; botany; gardens, materia medica, pharmacy, drugs, archaeology, medical traditions, and continuity of scientific knowledge in the East and West. The papers reach across many fields of scholarship, science, and medicine and are, necessarily and fundamentally, trans-disciplinary, trans-chronological, and trans-geographic. These volumes are not so much a Festschrift as an approach to Alain’s work through many disciplines and methods, a discussion of the current status of each field, and an opening into new perspectives.
After more than fifty years since the last publication, the cuneiform texts relating to the treatment of the loss of male sexual desire and vigor in Mesopotamia are collected in this volume. The aim of the book is to present Mesopotamian medical tradition regarding the so-called nīš libbi therapies.
šà-zi-ga in Sumerian, nīš libbi in Akkadian, lit. "raising of the 'heart'", is the expression used to indicate a group of texts intended to recover the male sexual desire. This medical tradition is preserved from the Middle Babylonian period to the Achaemenid one. This broad range testifies to the importance of the transmission of this material throughout Mesopotamian history.
The book provides the edition of this textual corpus and analyzes it in the light of new knowledge on ancient Near Eastern medicine. Moreover, this volume aims to show how theories and methodologies of Cultural Anthropology, Ethnopsychiatry and Gender Studies are useful for understanding the Mesopotamian medical system. This edition is an important tool for understanding Mesopotamian medical knowledge for Assyriologist, however since the texts have been translated and discussed using the anthropological and gender perspectives they are accessible also to scholars of other research fields, such as History of Medicine, Sexuality and Gender.
This book is a study of three iatrosofia (the notebooks of traditional healers) from the Ottoman and modern periods of Greece. The main text is a collection of the medical recipes of the monk Gymnasios Lauriōtis (b. 1858). Gymnasios had a working knowledge of over 2,000 plants and their use in medical treatments. Two earlier iatrosofia are used for parallels for Gymnasios’s recipes. One was written c. 1800 by a practical doctor near Khania, Crete, and illustrated by a second hand. The second iatrosofion dates to the sixteenth century; ascribed to a Meletios, the text survives in the Codex Vindobonensis gr. med. 53. The contents of these and other iatrosofia are predominantly medical, with many of the remedies taken from folk medicine, classical and Hellenistic pharmacological writers, and Galen.
The book opens with a biography of the monk Gymnasios and his recipes and then a description of the Cretan and Meletios iatrosofia. The iatrosophia, their role in Greek medical history, and the methods of healing are the subject of chapter 2. The Greek text of Gymnasios’s recipes are accompanied by a facing English translation. A commentary offers for each of Gymnasios’s recipes passages (translated into English) from the two other iatrosophia to serve as parallels, as well as an analysis of the pharmacopoeia in the medical texts. The book concludes with Greek and English indices of the material medica (plants, mineral, and animal substances) and the diseases, and then a general index.
The medical literature of ancient Greece has been much studied during the 20th century, with a particular activity from the 1970s on. In spite of this intense activity, the search for Greek medical manuscripts still relies on the catalogues compiled in the early 20th century by a group of philologists led by the German historian of Greek philosophy and medicine Hermann Diels. However useful the so-called Diels has been and still is, it is now in need of a thorough revision. The present six-tome set is a first step in that direction. In tome 1 it offers a fac-simile reproduction of Diels’ catalogues with an index of all the manuscripts cited throughout the work. In the following three tomes, it provides a reconstruction of the text contained in the manuscripts listed in Diels on the basis of Diels’ catalogue. Proceeding as Diels did, these three tomes distinguish the manuscripts containing Hippocratic texts (2), Galenic texts (3) and all the other texts considered in Diels (4). Tome 5 sums up all the information about all texts in each manuscript and tome 6 offers a concordance of all citations of manuscripts in the 5 tomes, in addition to the index of the non-Greek manuscripts and addenda. The present work will be a reference for all scholars interested in Greek medical literature and manuscripts, as well as for any historian of medicine, medical book, medical tradition and medical culture.
Greek medical manuscripts have been catalogued differently over the centuries. Based on the inventory of their texts in Diels' lists, this tome offers the first standardized catalogue. When appropriate, manuscript location or shelfmark according to Diels have been corrected and updated to reflect the current state of collections worldwide. This tome is the first step toward a full catalogue that will renew understanding of the Greek medical tradition and ultimately lead to the much-awaited New Diels.
