Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures

Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures
Author: Ulrike Steinert
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2020-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351335103

Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures puts historical disease concepts in cross-cultural perspective, investigating perceptions, constructions and experiences of health and illness from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Focusing on the systematisation and classification of illness in its multiple forms, manifestations and causes, this volume examines case studies ranging from popular concepts of illness through to specialist discourses on it. Using philological, historical and anthropological approaches, the contributions cover perspectives across time from East Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, spanning ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome to Tibet and China. They aim to capture the multiplicity of disease concepts and medical traditions within specific societies, and to investigate the historical dynamics of stability and change linked to such concepts. Providing useful material for comparative research, the volume is a key resource for researchers studying the cultural conceptualisation of illness, including anthropologists, historians and classicists, among others.

Paralysin Cave

Paralysin Cave
Author: John M. McMahon
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2018-07-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004330968

This volume explores the literary representation of male sexual dysfunction and discusses the natural and supernatural elements of an ancient folk medical system based on conceptual associations between male sexuality and specific plants, animals and minerals. The work incorporates material from both literary and scientific sources to draw parallels between ancient and modern paradigms of healing. The literary depiction of attempts to remedy impotence demonstrates how an accessibility to cures contributes to the sexual and social reintegration of the sufferer. The Satyrica of Petronius echoes this process by means of the text itself and so effects similar ends. The book provides new insights into literature and the ancient belief systems underlying it with its original and integrative approach to disciplines such as philology, botany, mineralogy, zoology and medicine.

Clio's Other Sons

Clio's Other Sons
Author: John D Dillery
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2015-04-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 047212045X

Soon after the death of Alexander the Great, the priest Berossus wrote the first known narrative and comprehensive history of his native Babylon, and the priest Manetho likewise wrote the first such history of his native Egyptian civilization. Nothing like these histories had been produced before in these cultures. Clio’s Other Sons considers why that is: why were these histories written at this point, and for what purposes? Berossus and Manetho operated at the crossings of several political, social, and intellectual worlds. They were members of native elites under the domination of Macedonian overlords; in their writings we can see suggestions that they collaborated in the foreign rule of their lands, but at the same time we see them advocating for their cultures. Their histories were written in Greek and betray active engagement with Greek historical writing, but at the same time these texts are clearly composed from native records, are organized along lines determined by local systems of time-reckoning, and articulate views that are deeply informed by regional scholarly and wisdom traditions. In this volume John Dillery charts the interactions of all these features of these historians. An afterword considers Demetrius, the approximate contemporary of Berossus and Manetho in time, if not in culture. While his associates wrote new histories, Demetrius’ project was a rewriting of an existing text, the Bible. This historiographical “corrective” approach sheds light on the novel historiography of Manetho and Berossus.