Smelling and Smelting: Learning with the Senses in Theory and Practice
By Valeria V. Sergueenkova
The “material turn” in histories of technology and the emphasis away from invention in favor of “innovation-in-use” (Edgerton 1999; 2006; cf. Latour 1986) have had a salutary effect on scholarship on ancient science and technology. Recent work in the field now more readily explores epigraphical and archaeological evidence along with literary texts and focuses on the interactions between science and technology, increasingly recognizing that specialized knowledge was not exclusively transmitted in textual form of by (Cuomo 2007; 2008; Greene 2008a; 2008b).
Jack of All Trades? Medical Practitioners and the Design, Manufacture, and Use of Instruments, Apparatuses, and Machines
By Jane Draycott
What sort of technical education did ancient Greek and Roman medical practitioners have with respect to the instruments, apparatuses, and machines that they seemingly frequently needed to design, manufacture, and use in the treatment of congenital or acquired bone conditions such as clubfoot, dislocation, fracture, amputation, and avulsion? Ancient medical treatises do not tend to explicate the process of designing and manufacturing such items, and even the instructions given regarding using them are hardly comprehensive step by step guides (e.g. Drachmann 1963).
Teaching Clinical Judgment: Methodist and Galenic Approaches
By Katherine D. van Schaik
Recent literature in the field of ancient medicine has focused on patients’ experiences of health and disease (Holmes 2010, Thumiger and Petridou 2016), on the characterization of many types of healer in the “medical market place” (Israelowich 2015), on patients’ choices regarding health and disease (ibid.), and on the relationship between the healer and the patient (Mattern 2013). This paper offers a different approach to studies of the physician-patient relationship by asking two related questions: First, how did physicians decide on a particular diagnosis and treatment for a patient?
Teaching Trees – Tree Teaching: The Ancient Art of Grafting
By Laurence Totelin
The art of grafting, that of cloning trees, played a crucial role in the propagation of staple fruits trees, such as the apple, the pear, the cherry, the fig, and the olive, in the ancient Mediterranean world. It also led to the development of ornamental trees that bore several varieties of fruits. Greek and Roman authors interested in botany and agriculture, and most prominently Theophrastus, Varro, Vergil, Columella and Palladius, wrote extensively on the various techniques of grafting.