Studies in ancient medicine最新文献

Galen is extremely valuable as a source for the history of medicine because of the amount of information that he provides about the teaching and the study of this discipline - both in by-gone eras and in his own days. For my contribution I have chosen a few examples of what has seemed most significant to me. Generally speaking, I have focused on two lexical families: that of ????? and that of ???????, this being an area that I had dealt with in part before.2

Two late medieval handbooks of surgery, written in Middle Dutch, are used here as sources for answering the question: which value did book-learning and formal education offer to non-academic late medieval surgeons? The authors, the Flemish surgeons Jan Yperman (ca. 1330) and Thomaes Scellinck van Thienen (fl. 1343), probably both lacked a university education, and wrote in the vernacular. In their works, they employed the fiercest rhetoric possible against the empirics or lay surgeons. Their knowledge of surgery was much less than that of Yperman or Scellinck, and accordingly, the variety in their remedies was very poor. Therefore, the lay surgeons' results were bad, and it was shameful and a disgrace that they could actually practice the way they did. These and similar accounts of lay surgery, coming from the learned tradition of surgery, have often been believed at face value. However, close-reading of the surgical texts provides a much more nuanced image of lay surgeons as confident practitioners, sharing the medical discourse of their more learned colleagues. Lack of knowledge may even have benefitted surgical practice, as the predictable remedies of empirics presumably appeared far less threatening than the varied and sometimes invasive techniques of learned surgeons. Furthermore, lay surgeons were not hampered by academic scrupules in claiming the most fantastic cures, which may have benefitted their bussiness on the competitive medical market of the late Middle Ages.

The Hippocratic Corpus testifies to the existence of literate doctors, as well as to literate laymen interested in medicine, by the close of the fifth century BC. It is only in later Antiquity, however, that one can begin to speak with confidence about medical literacy encompassing a wide range of specific physicians and a lay public with valetudinarian interests. Evidence from the Roman province of Egypt, when coupled with testimony from Galen and others, is particularly helpful in the effort to sketch a portrait of writers and readers for medical texts. Of particular interest are the joins between the medical writers who have come down to us through the manuscript traditions, many of them practicing and lecturing to the elites of Rome, Alexandria, and eventually Constantinople, and the more ordinary practitioners and their students, friends, and neighbors in the towns and villages of Roman Egypt. My paper surveys texts on papyrus and other materials that bear witness to medical literacy: first, private letters that discuss medical matters; second, didactic texts that played a role in doctors' education, such as the catechisms (erōtapokriseis) and medical definitions; and third, collections of recipes, some of which receptaria were once rolls of many columns, while others are but a single sheet with one or two recipes. The some four hundred recipes written down in Roman and Byzantine Egypt emphasize the degree to which the same or similar therapeutic medicaments are shared with medical authors of the manuscript traditions from Dioscorides and Galen to Oribasius, Aetius, and Paul of Aegina.

When one examines Alexandrian commentaries on works of Galen and Hippocrates, disclosed are essential guides to the Art of Medicine as practiced in the late fifth, sixth, and early seventh centuries. These are outlines and contents of a 'medical curriculum' in late Byzantine Alexandria, as well as Ravenna, and thanks to the patient and skilled labors of Dickson,' Duffy,2 Irmer, Palmieri, Pritchet, Westerink, and others, following and building on the pioneering studies of Bräutigam, Meyerhoff, and Temkin, medical historians can now peruse carefully edited Greek and Latin texts and generally reliable translations of some commentaries by Agnellus of Ravenna, John of Alexandria, Palladius, and Stephanus of Athens. Deeply experienced medical practitioners became teachers of would-be medical students in Alexandria and Ravenna. Alexandria had long functioned as a city reputed to be the home of medical instruction, and by ca. 550 or slightly later, teachers began to produce commentaries on the classic texts of Greek and Roman medicine, with Galen and Hippocrates as major authorities. Underpinning what the medical professors set down in their commentaries were extended lives spent in the actual practice of medicine, sometimes as military physicians (as may have been the case of Paul of Aegina in the early seventh century), sometimes as doctors who had gained lengthy experience in Alexandria itself, and sometimes as medical professionals who had emigrated to Egypt after successful careers in another part of the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire. Reflecting time as a medical student and later career in Constantinople, Aetius of Amida's Tetrabiblon foreshadows editorial mechanics and techniques of textual exegesis as they emerge more clearly with the medical commentators after 550. It may well be that Stephanus, 'the Philosopher and Physician', was originally from Athens, but whether he was or not, the attribution of an Athenian background suggests that non-Alexandrian physicians either were recruited or that the growing fame of medical instruction attracted accomplished personnel from other cities and provinces of the Empire.

This paper deals with both the reality and the idealization of training of midwives in the Roman Empire. It aims at a full survey of the existing source material (mainly literary and epigraphical sources, though iconographical and papyrological evidence has been included in the discussion). For the first time, a complete collection of the epigraphically attested Latin cases will be given. Moreover, I will deal with the apparent contradiction between the image of the educated midwife as it is exhibited mainly by Soranus, and the picture of midwives as low class women as it is revealed in other sources. In doing so, I will make use of the concept of differential equations, as applied by Joshel and Murnaghan concerning women and slaves in ancient society. As such, I will take issue with the Cilliers and Retief thesis about the social role of women in ancient medicine.

In the fifth and fourth centuries BC, ancient Greek medical practitioners began to use persuasive rhetoric in their practice of medicine. This paper will explore two areas related to rhetoric and medical instruction in ancient Greece--first, the nature of rhetorical instruction given to--or at least expected of--aspiring physicians and second, the effect of rhetoric on the public authority of the physician, as illuminated by the contrasting image of the physician in the Platonic corpus. The first section will examine the Hippocratic Corpus for basic elements of rhetoric with a view to the question: Did the increasing recognition of these techniques by the public actually harm the doctor's public image by creating 'the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric?' The second section focusing on Plato will serve as a contrast to the Hippocratic physician, since Plato purposefully avoids criticizing the medical use of rhetoric while strongly criticizing other uses of rhetoric.

The Hippocratic treatise The Art is an epideictic speech in defence of medicine against certain unnamed detractors. The author of The Art is fully aware of the fact that for him, language (as opposed to, say, a live demonstration) is the medium of education. Accordingly, the author shows full command of the main issues of the late fifth century 'sophistic' debate on the nature and the correct and effective use of language. In his views on language, the author seems to adopt a quite positivistic stance. For him, words reflect our perception and interpretation of the visual appearances or eidea of the things that are, and these appearances prove the existence of things in nature. To this extent, language reflects reality, provided that we language users have the expertise to form correct interpretations of what we observe. At the same time, language remains a secondary phenomenon: it is not a 'growth' of nature, but a set of conventional signs that have a basis in reality only if they are applied correctly. There is always the possibility of incorrect interpretation of our perceptions, which will lead to an incorrect use of language that does not reflect real phenomena. Words remain conventional expressions, and not all words can be expected to reflect the truth. In fact, the unnamed detractors of the art are victim to many such incorrect interpretations. Consistent with his view of language as secondary to visual phenomena, the author claims in his peroration that as a medium for the defence of medicine, the spoken word is generally considered less effective than live demonstrations. This modesty, while undoubtedly effective as a means to catch the sympathy of his public, still seems slightly overstated. Our author is fully aware of the powers and limitations of his medium, and shows great sophistication in its use.

This chapter explores Galen's attitude toward instruction and teaching, and in particular the ways in which he conceptualized and articulated the didactic function of his writings. Galen's own rhetoric about why he wrote was often strident - his disparagement of contemporaries is famous, and his fondness for polemic is often regarded as a function of an eristic and arrogant personality. I suggest, however, that Galen's self-avowed role as a kind of public censor may derive as much from an amalgamation of rhetorical postures found in various literary and philosophical genres as it does from an inherently intemperate character. By examining various passages in Galen's protreptic and psychological works, I argue that his frequent stances of vituperative indignation and self-righteousness often resemble those found in satirical writings, from Cynic diatribe through Greek and Roman satirical poetry. Galen no doubt felt himself to be working in a serious tradition of Platonic and Stoic moralizing, but his particular form of didacticism was informed by various strategies assimilated from Greco-Roman serio-comic traditions.