Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception

461 Pages·2020·2.614 MB·English

by  Chiara Thumiger

Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception
Studies in Ancient Medicine
Managing Editor
Philip J. van der Eijk (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Editors
Ann Ellis Hanson (Yale University)
Brooke Holmes (Princeton University)
Orly Lewis (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
John Scarborough (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Joseph Ziegler (University of Haifa)
Volume 53
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sam
Holism in Ancient Medicine
and Its Reception
Edited by
Chiara Thumiger
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Image by Christoph Geiger.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thumiger, Chiara, editor.
Title: Holism in ancient medicine and its reception / edited by Chiara
 Thumiger.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Studies in ancient
 medicine, 09251421 ; 53 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020040624 (print) | LCCN 2020040625 (ebook) |
 ISBN 9789004443082 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004443143 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Holistic medicine. | Medicine—History.
Classification: LCC R733 .H64 2021 (print) | LCC R733 (ebook) |
 DDC 610—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040624
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040625
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 0925-1421
isbn 978-90-04-44308-2 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-44314-3 (e-book)
Copyright 2021 by Chiara Thumiger, except where stated otherwise. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv,
Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
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Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Abbreviations viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Chiara Thumiger
Part 1
Holism: Methodological and Theoretical Perspectives
1 Holism, Parts, Wholes 25
Chiara Thumiger
2 Holism, Sympathy, and the Living Being in Ancient Greek Medicine
and Philosophy 47
Brooke Holmes
3 ‘Holism’ in Cognitive Approaches to the Ancient Emotions 84
William Michael Short
Part 2
Is Graeco-Roman Medicine Holistic?
4 Hippocratic Holisms 113
Hynek Bartoš
5 Holism and the Methodists 133
David Leith
6 Is Graeco-Roman Medicine Holistic? Galen and Ancient
Medical-Philosophical Debates 154
P. N. Singer
7 Holism of Body and Mind in Hippocratic Medicine
and Greek Tragedy 184
Elizabeth Craik
vi Contents
8 Plato’s Charmides on Philosophy as Holistic Medical Practice 201
Giouli Korobili and Konstantinos Stefou
9 A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology 220
Laurence M. V. Totelin
10 Cohesive Causes in Ancient Greek Philosophy and Medicine 237
Sean Coughlin
11 Pneuma as a Holistic Concept in Galen 268
Julius Rocca
Part 3
Medical Holism beyond the Graeco-Roman World
12 Humoralism in Āyurvedic Medicine 295
Francis Zimmermann
13 A Systemic Etiology of Sicknesses from Ancient Iraq: Organ Systems
and the Functional Holism of the Babylonian Body 318
John Z. Wee
14 Epidemic Disease in a Humoral Environment: From Airs, Waters
and Places to the Renaissance 357
Vivian Nutton
15 Mind-Body Interaction: The Influence of Ancient Ideas in
Twelfth-Century England 377
Claire Trenery
16 ‘Treating the Patient, Not Just the Disease’: Reading Ancient Medicine
in Modern Holistic Medicine 400
Helen King
Index Rerum 425
Index Locorum 437
Index Verborum (selected) 446
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Wellcome Trust for sponsoring the conference where
this volume originated, along with the Institute of Classical Studies in London,
which hosted the event in September 2017, and Greg Woolf for his support as
Director. Above all else, I am grateful once again to the Wellcome Trust for
generously funding my fellowships in the Department of Classics and Ancient
History at the University of Warwick at the time when this project began, as
well as during the preparation of this volume. I would also like to thank the
Excellence Cluster ROOTS at Kiel University, with which I have been affiliated
during the final phases of preparation of the manuscript, for its generous help
and backing. I am grateful to all the participants in the original conference
for both their written contributions and their constructive discussion there.
Simon Swain was very helpful and positive about this project from the start,
and offered precious advice before and during the preparation of the volume.
The authors and I also benefitted immensely from the comments and con-
structive criticism offered by numerous readers and peer-reviewers, which
have made a great difference in matters large and small. Among them, it is
a particular pleasure to mention the anonymous reader at Brill who offered
insightful advice, and Philip van der Eijk for his constant interest in the project
and support. S. Douglas Olson’s editorial expertise was vital in converting the
various individual manuscripts into their final published form. Finally, Giulia
Moriconi, Dinah Rapliza and the rest of the team at the press deserve warm
thanks for their assistance throughout.
Chiara Thumiger
Abbreviations
CMG Corpus Medicorum Graecorum
CML Corpus Medicorum Latinorum
Leipzig and Berlin, Teubner, Akademie-Verlag and de Gruyter; texts available
online at: http://cmg.bbaw.de/epubl/online/editionen.html
AHw W. von Soden (ed.). Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz (1965, 1972, and 1974)
AMT R. Campbell Thompson (ed.) Assyrian Medical Texts from the Originals in the
British Museum. London: Milford (1923).
BAM Prefix to cuneiform hand copies numbered consecutively across vols. 1–6 of
F. Köcher, Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen.
Berlin: De Gruyter (1963–1980)
CAD The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (1956–2011)
CT Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, &c. in the British Museum. London:
British Museum (1896–)
IG I3 Inscriptiones Graecae I: Inscriptiones Atticae Euclidis anno anteriores. Ed.
D. Lewis and J. Jeffery. 3rd edn. Berlin. De Gruyter (1981, 1994)
I.Métr. Metrical Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Ed. E. Bernand, Inscriptions
métriques de l’Egypte gréco-romaine. Paris (1969).
K. K. G. Kühn (ed.) Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, 22 vols., Leipzig (1821–33)
L. É. Littré (ed.) Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrate. Paris: J. B. Baillière (1839–61)
LBAT T. G. Pinches and J. N. Strassmaier, Late Babylonian Astronomical and Related
Texts. Providence: Brown University Press (1955)
STT Prefix to cuneiform hand copies numbered consecutively across O. R.
Gurney and J. J. Finkelstein, The Sultantepe Tablets, vol. 1. London: Percy
Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd. (1957) and O. R. Gurney and P. Hulin, The
Sultantepe Tablets, vol. 2. London: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd.
(1964)
Notes on Contributors
Hynek Bartoš
is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the Charles University
in Prague. He is the author of Philosophy and Dietetics in the Hippocratic On
Regimen (Brill 2015) and a range of essays on the history of ancient Greek phi-
losophy and medicine. Most recently, he co-edited (with C. G. King) the vol-
ume Heat, Pneuma, and Soul in Ancient Philosophy and Science (CUP 2020).
Sean Coughlin
is Research Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 980 Episteme in
Bewegung funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Institute
for Classical Philology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He was previously a
Research Fellow at Excellence Cluster Topoi and a Visiting Research Fellow at
Einstein Centre Chronoi (Berlin), the Research Training Group “Philosophy,
Science and the Sciences” (Berlin), and the Martin Buber Society of Fellows
(Jerusalem). He is co-editor with David Leith and Orly Lewis of The Concept of
Pneuma after Aristotle (Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2020) and he publishes on topics
in Ancient Greek philosophy, science, and medicine.
Elizabeth Craik
formerly professor at Kyoto University, is now honorary professor in the School
of Classics, University of St Andrews. She has in recent years published editions,
with commentaries, of several Hippocratic texts (Places in Man, On Sight, On
Anatomy, On Glands) and a complete scholarly guide to the Hippocratic Corpus
(The Hippocratic Corpus: Content and Context), as well a range of articles.
Brooke Holmes
is Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She is
the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body
in Ancient Greece (2010) and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy (2012), in addi-
tion to being the co-editor of five volumes, most recently Antiquities beyond
Humanism (2019) and the exhibition project Liquid Antiquity (2017). From
2012 to 2020 she directed the programme Postclassicisms and co-authored
Postclassicisms (2020). She is finishing a book entitled The Tissue of the World:
Life, Nature, and Sympathy.
x Notes on Contributors
Helen King
is a historian of medicine and the body. She retired from The Open University
in 2017. Since then she has held a one-year post at Gustavus Adolphus College,
MN, to promote interdisciplinary approaches to history. Her earlier career in-
cluded visiting roles at the Peninsula Medical School and the universities of
Vienna, Texas, Notre Dame and British Columbia. She has published on as-
pects of medicine from classical Greece to the nineteenth century and her
most recent book, Hippocrates Now, was published in 2019. She is currently
working on a history of the female body for Profile Books.
Giouli Korobili
is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of
Utrecht. She studied Classical Philology and Philosophy at the National and
Kapodistrian University of Athens (BA), at the University of Ioannina (MA) and
at Humboldt University of Berlin (Ph.D.). She has contributed to a number of
collective volumes on Aristotle, ancient medicine and Byzantine Aristotelian
commentators. She is currently revising her Ph.D. thesis on Aristotle’s On Youth
and Old Age, on Life and Death, on Respiration for publication.
David Leith
is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Exeter. His research focuses
on Graeco-Roman medicine, and especially its interactions with philosophy.
He has published on the Hellenistic and Roman medical sects and their theo-
ries, especially Herophilus, Erasistratus, Asclepiades and the Methodists, and
has edited fragments of medical papyri for The Oxyrhynchus Papyri series. He is
currently preparing an edition, with essays and commentary, of the testimonia
on Asclepiades of Bithynia.
Vivian Nutton
is emeritus professor of the history of medicine at UCL. He has written exten-
sively on many aspects of the history of medicine from the Ancient Greeks to
the seventeenth century. His recent books include Ancient Medicine, 2nd edi-
tion, 2013; Johann Guinther and Andreas Vesalius, Principles of Anatomy ac-
cording to Galen, 2017; An Autobibliography by John Caius, 2018; and Galen, a
thinking Doctor in Imperial Rome, 2020. His current project is a history of med-
icine in the sixteenth century. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a
member of the Ancient Society of College Youths.