1st Edition

Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures Sickness, Health, and Local Epistemologies

Edited By Ulrike Steinert Copyright 2020
    338 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    338 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    List of figures

    List of tables

    List of contributors

    Preface

    List of abbreviations

    Introduction: sickness, cultural classifications and local epistemologies

    ULRIKE STEINERT (IN CONSULTATION WITH ELISABETH HSU)

    PART I Disease concepts and healing: new approaches to knowledge and practice in premodern medical texts and traditions

    1 Distinctive issues in the history of medicine in antiquity

    GEOFFREY E. R. LLOYD

    2 How to read a recipe? Working backwards from the prescription to the complaint

    ELISABETH HSU

    3 Experiencing the dead in ancient Egyptian healing texts

    RUNE NYORD

    PART II Disease classifications in premodern medical texts and traditions from the Near East, Mediterranean and East Asia

    4 Types of diagnoses in Papyrus Ebers and Smith

    SUSANNE RADESTOCK

    5 Ancient Egyptian prescriptions for the back and abdomen and their Mesopotamian and Mediterranean counterparts

    JULIANE UNGER

    6 Disease concepts and classifications in ancient Mesopotamian medicine

    ULRIKE STEINERT

    7 Classification of illnesses in the Hippocratic Corpus

    ELIZABETH CRAIK

    8 The delicacy of the rabbinic asthenes: sickness, weakness or self-indulgence?

    AARON AMIT

    9 The Paradise of Wisdom: streams of tradition in the first medical encyclopaedia in Arabic

    LUCIA RAGGETTI

    10 The Tree of Nosology in Tibetan medicine

    KATHARINA SABERNIG

    PART III Mental illness in ancient medical systems

    11 Disturbing disorders: reconsidering the problem of ‘mental diseases’ in ancient Mesopotamia

    M. ERICA COUTO-FERREIRA

    12 Classification, explanation and experience: mental disorder in Graeco-Roman antiquity

    PETER N. SINGER

    Appendix 1: the ‘Five Twig Powder’ and four of its variants

    Appendix 2: composition of the polypharmacies

    Index

    Biography

    Ulrike Steinert is a postdoctoral researcher in the Research Training Group 1876 ‘Early Concepts of Humans and Nature’ at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. Her research and publications focus on the history of Mesopotamian medicine and culture, the Akkadian language, women’s health, gender and body concepts. She is the author of a study on the body, self and identity in Mesopotamian texts, entitled Aspekte des Menschseins im Alten Mesopotamien. Eine Studie zu Person und Identität im 2. und 1. Jt. v. Chr. (2012) and is currently preparing a monograph on Women’s Health Care in Ancient Mesopotamia: An Edition of the Textual Sources.

    "One clear hope for this volume is that by bringing together scholars from medical anthropology, the history of medicine, and the philosophy of medicine, even if the cross-disciplinary dialogue is just beginning, the questions opened up by the book as a whole will give us increasing opportunities to expand the conversation in ways that will make this material and these concerns more coherent going forward. Steinert and the authors of these individual chapters are to be heartily applauded for the effort." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review