Ancient Medicine

This paper presents a brief comparative analysis of the zodiacal melothesia which appears in Manilius’ epic Latin astrological poem Astronomica (20-40 CE) and in the Yavana Jātaka (transl. “Greek Horoscopy”) of Sphujidhvaja, the first Sanskrit horoscopy text (2nd-4th cent. CE). Melothesia refers to the arrangement of the 12-sign Babylonian zodiac on 12 regions of the human body which they govern.

Magicae Herbae, Alchemy, and the 15th Century Reception of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis

Ancient Greek contained various terms we could translate as human ‘skin.’ One might therefore wonder how these words differ in meaning. In this paper I focus on two particularly common examples of these skin terms: khrṓs (χρώς) and dérma (δέρμα). By mapping each term’s discrete associations I am able to point out both overlap and differences in their meaning, and highlight their sociocultural significance.

Of all the cities of Roman Hispania, the colony of Augusta Emerita (Mérida) has provided one of the richest collections of evidence for doctors and the practice of medicine in Rome’s western provinces (Bejarano 2015). Various collections of medical instruments have been discovered in burials in the colony’s suburbium, while six inscriptions apparently attest medical practitioners, as well as a seventh from Emerita’s large territory (Rémy & Faure 2010, Catalogue: Lusitanie, nº 2-6, 8 and AE 2009, 518).

During the second century CE, the Greek physician and polymath Galen of Pergamon practiced medicine in Rome and, instrumental to his success, composed expansive diagnostic, surgical, and anatomical texts that set the medical precedent up until the Renaissance. Many of his texts also narrate clinical encounters between this notable physician and specific patients whom he treated.