The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine

The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine

Author: John Z Wee

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-11-13

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 9004356770

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The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine explores how analogy and metaphor illuminate and shape conceptions about the human body and disease, through 11 case studies from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.


Gastrointestinal Disease and Its Treatment in Ancient Mesopotamia

Gastrointestinal Disease and Its Treatment in Ancient Mesopotamia

Author: J. Cale Johnson

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-11-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1501506579

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Babylonian medicine is the most important corpus of ancient medicine prior to the Greeks. This volume provides a comprehensive picture of how gasrtrointestinal illness, jaundice and related fevers, as well as diarrhea were treated in ancient Mesopotamia. The editions include transliterations, straightforward translations and essential commentary, and are divided into three main sections: the standard corpus for the treatment of gastrointestinal illness in Royal Library in Nineveh (otherwise known as the sualu subcorpus), the related group of texts that attribute intestinal disturbances to malevolent ghosts and a third group of texts focused on diarrhea. In addition to the standard compendia, isolated precursor texts, which were incorporated into these compendia, are included here in appendices. This volume provides an overarching picture of the entire field of gastrointestinal illnesses and related conditions in ancient Mesopotamia.


Mesopotamian Medicine and Magic

Mesopotamian Medicine and Magic

Author: Strahil V. Panayotov

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-10-22

Total Pages: 968

ISBN-13: 9004368086

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Mesopotamian Medicine and Magic. Studies in Honour of Markham J. Geller is a thematically focused collection of 34 brand-new essays bringing to light a representative selection of the rich and varied scientific and technical knowledge produced chiefly by the cuneiform cultures. The contributions concentrate mainly on Mesopotamian scholarly descriptions and practices of diagnosing and healing diverse physical ailments and mental distress. The festschrift contains both critical editions of new texts as well as analytical studies dealing with various issues of Mesopotamian medical and magical lore. Currently, this is the largest edited volume devoted to this topic, significantly contributing to the History of Ancient Sciences.


Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig

Author: John Z Wee

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-12-16

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 9004417567

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Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig is intended for specialists in cuneiform studies, and includes a cuneiform edition, English translation, and notes on medical lexicography for thirty Sa-gig commentary tablets and fragments, as well as a study on technical notations recurring in these commentaries. Within the Cuneiform Monographs series, this book represents a companion volume to Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2019).


Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary

Author: John Z Wee

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-12-09

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 9004417532

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Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary is intended for historians of medicine and interpretation, and explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook. In line with commentators’ self-fashioning as experts of diverse disciplines, commentaries display intertextuality involving a variety of lexical, astronomical, religious, magic, and literary compositions, while employing patterns of argumentation that resist categorization within any single branch of knowledge. Commentators’ choices of topics and comments, however, sought to harmonize atypical language and ideas in the Handbook with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body in therapeutic recipes. Scholastic rhetoric—supposedly unfettered to any discipline—served in fact as a pretext for affirming current forms of medical knowledge.


Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East

Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East

Author: Sofie Schiødt

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2023-08-29

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1479823155

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Comparative insights on astronomy, divination, and medicine from ancient texts Scientific Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East presents a collection of articles by leading scholars on scientific practices in the ancient world, with emphasis on the fields of medicine, astronomy, astrology, and other forms of divination. The essays engage with a wide variety of textual sources in many different languages and scripts from Egypt and the Near East spanning more than a millennium, including some texts that are edited and discussed here for the first time. The contributors to this volume were tasked with approaching their texts not only as specialists, but also from a cross-cultural perspective, and the resulting body of work reveals new and exciting evidence for the transfer of scientific knowledge across cultural borders in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. This book will be of interest primarily to specialists in the history of medicine, science, divination, and magic, as well as to papyrologists, Egyptologists, and Assyriologists.


Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception

Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception

Author: Chiara Thumiger

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-11-30

Total Pages: 461

ISBN-13: 9004443142

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This volume aims at exploring the ancient roots of ‘holistic’ approaches in the specific field of medicine and the life sciences, without, however, overlooking the larger theoretical implications of these discussions. Therefore, the project plans to broaden the perspective to include larger cultural discussions and, in a comparative spirit, reach out to some examples from non Graeco-Roman medical cultures. As such, it constitutes a fundamental contribution to history of medicine, philosophy of medicine, cultural studies, and ancient studies more broadly. The wide-ranging selection of chapters offers a comprehensive view of an exciting new field: the interrogation of ancient sources in the light of modern concepts in philosophy of medicine, as justification of the claim for their enduring relevance as object of study and, at the same time, as means to a more adequate contextualisation of modern debates within a long historical process. Contributors are: Hynek Bartoš, Sean Coughlin, Elizabeth Craik, Brooke Holmes, Helen King, Giouli Korobili, David Leith, Vivian Nutton, Julius Rocca, William Michael Short, P. N. Singer, Konstantinos Stefou, Chiara Thumiger, Laurence Totelin, Claire Trenery, John Wee, Francis Zimmermann.


Semantics and ‘Spirit’

Semantics and ‘Spirit’

Author: Joel A. J. Atwood

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-10-31

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 9004525394

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This work provides a new, integrated approach to analysing the meaning and use of complex nouns in the Hebrew Bible, focussed on anthropological uses of the word, רוח.


Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures

Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures

Author: Ulrike Steinert

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1351335103

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Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures puts historical disease concepts in cross-cultural perspective, investigating perceptions, constructions and experiences of health and illness from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Focusing on the systematisation and classification of illness in its multiple forms, manifestations and causes, this volume examines case studies ranging from popular concepts of illness through to specialist discourses on it. Using philological, historical and anthropological approaches, the contributions cover perspectives across time from East Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, spanning ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome to Tibet and China. They aim to capture the multiplicity of disease concepts and medical traditions within specific societies, and to investigate the historical dynamics of stability and change linked to such concepts. Providing useful material for comparative research, the volume is a key resource for researchers studying the cultural conceptualisation of illness, including anthropologists, historians and classicists, among others.


Body and Machine in Classical Antiquity

Body and Machine in Classical Antiquity

Author: Maria Gerolemou

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-06-30

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1316514668

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The first systematic exploration of the multifaceted relationship between human bodies and machines in classical antiquity.