SCS-85: Medical Texts

This paper examines Pliny’s epistolary accounts of the health struggles of family, friends, and slaves in his Letters in light of the imperial ideology of thaumaturgical healing that started to take shape during the civil war of 69 and extended at least as late as the reign of Hadrian (SHA Hadrian 25). As part of its program of imperial renewal, the Flavian dynasty laid claim to a capacity to heal that was unprecedentedly thaumaturgical in nature (Luke 2010).

The rhetorical strategies of the Hippocratic treatise De victu 4, which discusses the impact of a patient's dreams on the medical prognosis, find parallels in the earlier medical traditions attested in Mesopotamia. While Van der Eijk (2004) identified the imagery shared between De victu 4 and Babylonian dream omens, I draw on Babylonian medical texts to argue that rhetorical strategies for depicting gods, illnesses and body place De victu 4 in the context of Mesopotamian medical traditions.

In recent years, the conception of the transdisciplinarity of ancient sciences (Lloyd) has encouraged historians of science to account for disciplinary boundaries as conceived and practiced by the ancient Greeks themselves. Furthermore, there is a growing emphasis in the history of medicine on the perspective of patients, largely inspired by Canguilhem and Foucault (Porter, Petridou, Thumiger). To explore the implications of these theoretical turns, this paper addresses the therapeutic usage of vocal practices, a notion that demonstrates the fluid boundary between rhetoric and medicine.

The Gynaecia of Mustio are often considered within the panorama of medical Latin texts that come from a Greek model - in this case, the Γυναικεῖα of Soranus of Ephesus. This, on a certain extent, is absolutely true: our text is a treatise about gynaecology, supposedly written in the 6^th century AD in an African area; its author, a Mustio or Muscio unknown otherwise, declares that he has translated a gynaecia following Soranum and the content of the work confirms this information.

In this paper, I look at Aelius Aristides’ third Hieros Logos. While sections of this oration have been treated piecemeal (for example, Petridou (2017) discusses the initiation section at the end; Downie (2013, 105-7) and Petsalis-Diomidis (2010, 135-6) discuss his description of pain at III.16-19), it has not been treated either as a unified whole or in relation to the rest of the HL. This may be because the topic is self-evident and seemingly mundane; it is a chronicle of the materia medica prescribed by the god.