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By far the most influential work on the history of the body, across a wide range of academic disciplines, remains that of Thomas Laqueur. This book puts on trial the one-sex/two-sex model of Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud through a detailed exploration of the ways in which two classical stories of sexual difference were told, retold and remade from the mid-sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Agnodike, the 'first midwife' who disguises herself as a man and then exposes herself to her potential patients, and Phaethousa, who grows a beard after her husband leaves her, are stories from the ancient world that resonated in the early modern period in particular. Tra...
This volume contains modern editions of three physiological treatises by Theophrastus of Eresus, who was Artistotle's pupil and successor as head of the Peripatetic School. The treatises are concerned with human phenomena of sweat, dizziness and fatigue, and exhibit close ties to the contemporary medical literature. The Greek text of each treatise is based on a new reading of the principal manuscripts. The text is accompanied by an apparatus of parallel text and variant readings. The excerpts of Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, are printed below the Theophrastean text in order to facilitate comparison. An English translation appears opposite the Greek text. There are brief notes to the translation, and a fuller commentary follows. Indices of important words and topics and a selective bibliography complete each edition.
This innovative and wide-ranging volume is the first systematic exploration of the multifaceted relationship between human bodies and machines in classical antiquity. It examines the conception of the body and bodily processes in mechanical terms in ancient medical writings, and looks into how artificial bodies and automata were equally configured in human terms; it also investigates how this knowledge applied to the treatment of the disabled and the diseased in the ancient world. The volume examines the pre-history of what develops, at a later stage, and more specifically during the early modern period, into the full science of iatromechanics in the context of which the human body was treated as a machine and medical treatments were devised accordingly. The volume facilitates future dialogue between scholars working on different areas, from classics, history and archaeology to history of science, philosophy and technology.
Contents: Stephen White: Opuscula and Opera in the Catalogue of Theophrastus' Works Han Baltussen: Theophrastean Echoes? The De Sensibus in the Platonic and Aristotelian Tradition Pamela M. Huby: Arabic Evidence about Theophrastus' De Sensibus Todd Ganson: A Puzzle Concerning the Aristotelian Notion of a Medium of Sense-Perception Istvan M. Bodnar: Theophrastus' De igne: Orthodoxy, Reform and Readjustment in the Doctrine of Elements Georg Wohrle: Ps-Aristoteles De Coloribus -aA Theophrastean Opusculum? David Sider: On On Signs - R.A.H. King: Nutrition and Fatigue Amneris Roselli: Greek Medical Theories of Fatigue Sabine Vogt: Theophrast, De Vertigine Armelle Debru: La sueur des corps: le De sudore de Theophraste face a la tradition medicale John Dillon: Theophrastus' Critique of the Old Academy in the Metaphysics H. Takahashi: Syriac Fragments of Theophrastean Meteorology and Mineralogy Index Contributors and Editors. (Franz Steiner 2002)
The first ever authoritative biography of Galen of Pergamum A.D. (129 - 216) - prodigious polymath, philosopher, shameless self-promoter, caustic wit and polemicist, and the single most influential figure in the history of western medicine from Roman times to the twentieth century.
Arab painting, preserved mainly in manuscript illustrations of the 12th to 14th centuries, is here treated as an artistic corpus fully deserving of appreciation in its own terms, and not as a mere precursor to Persian painting. The book assembles papers by a distinguished list of scholars that illuminate the variety of material that survives in scientific as well as literary manuscripts. Because of the contexts in which the paintings appear, a major theoretical concern is, precisely, the relationship of painting to text. It rejects earlier scholarly habits of analysing paintings in isolation, and proposes the integration of text and image as a more satisfactory framework within which to elucidate the characteristics and functions of this impressive body of work.
This book is a groundbreaking history of balance, exploring how a new model of equilibrium emerged during the medieval period.
We all want to understand the world around us, and the ancient Greeks were the first to try and do so in a way we can properly call scientific. Their thought and writings laid the essential foundations for the revivals of science in medieval Baghdad and renaissance Europe. Now their work is accessible to all, with this invaluable introduction to c.100 scientific authors active from 320 BCE to 230 CE. The book begins with an outline of a new socio-political model for the development and decline of Greek science, followed by eleven chapters that cover the main disciplines: * the science which the Greeks saw as fundamental - mathematics * astronomy * astrology and geography * mechanics * optics and pneumatics * the non-mathematical sciences of alchemy, biology, medicine and 'psychology'. Each chapter contains an accessible introduction on the origins and development of the topic in question, and all the authors are set in context with brief biographies.
This collection of papers studies the Hippocratic writings in their relationship to the intellectual, social, cultural and literary context in which they were written. ‘Context’ includes not only the Greek world, but also the medical thought and practice of other civilisations in the Mediterranean, such as Babylonian and Egyptian medicine. A further point of interest are the relations between the Hippocratic writings and ‘non-Hippocratic’ medical authors of the fifth and fourth century BCE, such as Diocles of Carystus, Praxagoras of Cos, as well as Plato, Aristotle and Theophrastus. The collection further includes studies of some of the less well-known works in the Hippocratic Corpus, such as Internal Affections, On the Eye, and Prorrheticon. And finally, a number of papers are devoted to the impact and reception of Hippocratic thought in later antiquity and the early modern period.