Conveying Authority and Authenticity through Experiment in the Hippocratic Corpus
By Michelle Lessard, University of Cincinnati
Although Hippocratic experimental procedures and analogies often seem unscientific to modern readers, the demonstrations described in the Hippocratic corpus provide valuable evidence for the development of observation-based reasoning (see von Staden 1975; Longhi 2018). A common line of inquiry is whether the Hippocratic doctors who wrote the treatises performed these proto-experiments, developed them as thought-experiments, or adapted them from earlier sources such as Presocratic texts (Senn 1929; Lloyd 1964, 1966; Lonie 1981; Langholf 1989; Fausti 2010).
Galen’s Creative Matter: Seeds, Cities, and Astrolabes
By Malina Buturovic, Yale University
As many of his readers have observed, Galen’s picture of divine creation in On the Usefulness of the Parts accords an unusually active role to matter, as the collaborator of the demiurge (Hankinson 2017; Das 2020). Rather than working against material intransigency, Galen’s Demiurge works alongside and in close collaboration with the intrinsic movements of matter. This paper surveys three crucial passages in which Galen explores the nature of this collaborative creative relationship between matter and the Demiurge.
To Heal a Wound - Four Medical Plasters recreated from Greco-Roman Medical Texts
By Allyson Blank, New York University
The medical materials of antiquity are a diverse and multidimensional group. Generally, these materials have been rendered approachable in modern scholarship by categorizations of type. These categorizations, then, lay the groundwork for meaningful investigation. The treatment of wounds as a general category offers an excellent opportunity for a close survey of a particular type of niche treatment. Exploring this topic, readers will encounter a material known as ‘Plaster’- καταπλάσμα in Greek and emplastra in Latin.
Technologies of Hope: Amulets and Networks of Care
By Anna Bonnell Friedin, University of Michigan
The physician Soranus was skeptical of amulets, but still maintained their usefulness in medical emergencies, including uterine hemorrhage: “...their application should not be forbidden, for even if the amulet does no good directly, still through hope (elpis) it will perhaps cause the patient to be more cheerful” (Gyn. 3.12.110–13 = Ilberg 3.42.3). This paper reads against the grain to explore the dynamic scene Soranus glosses over, in which a woman, perhaps having just given birth, begins to hemorrhage.
Coining Bodies, Minting Health
By Figen Geerts, New York University
Money constituted an important material reality of ancient care. Indeed, from the Greek archaic through the Roman era, both divine and mortal healers were known to make a fortune from their medical services: Pindar sings of Asklepios’ healing driven by the pursuit of gold (Pyth. 3.47-60); Herodotus recounts the physician Demodokes’ exorbitant annual salary of 12,000 drachmas a year (3.131-38); while Diodoros Sikolos depicts the avaricious Sulla, who laid hands on the healing shrines of Apollo, Asklepios, and Zeus, to pilfer their abundant riches (37.7).