Illness and Death

This paper uses a close reading of Aelius Aristides’ Oration 39 (Regarding the Well in the Temple of Asclepius) to reveal an affect of distributed haptics at work at the Pergamenian Asklepieion. Asclepius was a divine practitioner of medicine and doctors, as Alex Purves has noted (2018:5), diagnosed and treated patients by touch. Aristides’ Oration 39—On the Sacred Well—demonstrates that touch was at the heart of the healing agency of the god and that this agency was distributed throughout the temple site.

This paper explores how tuberculosis (phthisis/ phthoe) was understood and characterized in Greco-Roman antiquity as a disease transmissible between people. Although human-to-human transmission of tuberculosis was observed by non-medical authors, among the medical authors only Galen acknowledges its transmissibility. This paper explores the reasons for this disconnect between secular observation and medical theorizing about contagion, with tuberculosis as the specific case-study.

‘At the moment that our wellness is disturbed’, writes Max van Manen, ‘then we discover, as it were, our own bodies’ (1998: 12). Everyday bodily actions such as walking and talking are not typically the object of our attention until they become difficult, at which point our illnesses force us to reflect on our bodies as something distinct from our own minds and wills.

(Content Warning: This paper contains detailed discussion of infanticide and infant death)