1st Edition

Greek Medical Literature and its Readers From Hippocrates to Islam and Byzantium

Edited By Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, Sophia Xenophontos Copyright 2018
    252 Pages
    by Routledge

    252 Pages 14 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This volume focuses on the relationship between Greek medical texts and their audience(s), offering insights into how not only the backgrounds and skills of medical authors but also the contemporary environment affected issues of readership, methodology and mode of exposition. One of the volume’s overarching aims is to add to our understanding of the role of the reader in the contextualisation of Greek medical literature in the light of interesting case-studies from various – often radically different – periods and cultures, including the Classical (such as the Hippocratic corpus) and Roman Imperial period (for instance Galen), and the Islamic and Byzantine world. Promoting, as it does, more in-depth research into the intricacies of Greek medical writings and their diverse revival and transformation from the fifth century BC down to the fourteenth century AD, this volume will be of interest to classicists, medical historians and anyone concerned with the reception of the Greek medical tradition.



    Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/OA+PDFs+for+Cara/9781472487919_oachapter3.pdf



    Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/OA+PDFs+for+Cara/9781472487919_oachapter6.pdf



    Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/OA+PDFs+for+Cara/9781472487919_oachapter9.pdf

    Introduction, Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Sophia Xenophontos  PART I The Classical World  1. Alcmaeon and His Addressees: Revisiting the Incipit, Stavros Kouloumentas  2. Gone with the Wind: Laughter and the Audience of the Hippocratic Treatises, Laurence Totelin  3. The Professional Audiences of the Hippocratic Epidemics: Patient Cases in Hippocratic Scientific Communication, Chiara Thumiger  PART II The Imperial World  4. Galen’s Exhortation to the Study of Medicine: An Educational Work for Prospective Medical Students, Sophia Xenophontos  5. An Interpretation of the Preface to Medical Puzzles and Natural Problems 1 by Ps.-Alexander of Aphrodisias in Light of Medical Education, Michiel Meeusen  PART III The Islamic World  6. The User-Friendly Galen: Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq and the Adaptation of Greek Medicine for a New Audience, Uwe Vagelpohl  7. Medical Knowledge as Proof of the Creator’s Wisdom and the Arabic Reception of Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts, Elvira Wakelnig  PART IV The Byzantine World  8. Physician versus Physician: Comparing the Audience of On the Constitution of Man by Meletios and Epitome on the Nature of Men by Leo the Physician, Erika Gielen  9. Reading Galen in Byzantium: The Fate of Therapeutics to Glaucon, Petros Bouras-Vallianatos

    Biography

    Petros Bouras-Vallianatos is Wellcome Lecturer in History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, UK

    Sophia Xenophontos is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow, UK

    ‘Through nine chapters focusing on authors spreading from Hippocrates to the medieval readers of Galen, and covering such diverse areas as classical Greece, Byzantium, and the Islamic world, the volume offers an interesting array of concise case studies...The editors’ work must be commended for a coherent collection of chapters, with a clear focus and helpful pointers and bibliographies. It is also produced to a high standard. The collection will be especially useful to medical historians with a focus on ancient Greek medicine and its afterlife’ - Caroline Petit, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 94, Number 3 (Fall 2020)

    ‘... this volume enriches the bibliography and adds a significant title to the research into the complexities of Greek medical writings from the fifth century BC down to the fourteenth century AD, their reception and their influence on various intellectual milieus. Anyone interested in Greek medical tradition will gain a great profit from the book.’ - Maria Chrone, Byzantina Symmeikta 30 (2020)

    ‘The present volume does a good job in showing how, while claiming its status as an individual technê, ancient medicine remains sensitive to its sharedness and openness across a stratified audience whose members have different skills, needs and expectations... the volume deals with a novel – and thorny – subject, and for that it should be praised.’ - George Kazantzidis, The Classical Review 69.2 (2019)

    ‘[T]he editors have brought together some interesting articles ... These new collections of articles on a single topic have the advantage of making it easier for other scholars to locate relevant studies.’ - Timothy S. Miller, Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2018.07.30)