Head of a marble statuette of Asklepios. 3rd–2nd century BCE. MET Museum, 17.194.836.
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by Katherine Van Schaik
by Katherine Van Schaik
Apr. 22, 2025
"ChatGPT, could you please tell me what Galen would have thought about the ability of ChatGPT to pass the US Medical Licensing Exam?"
Katherine Van Schaik considers how Galen helps us think through AI in medicine today.
Katherine Van Schaik is an Assistant Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Studies and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University, as well as an Assistant Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences, with a focus on Musculoskeletal Imaging, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is a practicing physician and the author of the recent publication How to Be Healthy: An Ancient Guide to Wellness with Princeton University Press.
SAM Webinar
New Directions in Ancient Medical Research
April 08, 3:30–5:00 PM EST
Join four Goodwin prize winners (Claire Bubb, Colin Webster, Kassandra Miller, and myself, Aileen Das) to discuss how they settled on the topic of their first monographs, the publication process and the feedback they received along the way.
To register, use this link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_xLq-ancDRiKG0FN5hyWIhw
Farnese Bull, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, inv. no. 6002. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen from Wikisource.
Colin Webster examines the iconography and architecture of the Baths of Caracalla, as well as the texts of Galen, to outline how men's fitness in the Roman Empire could be constructed as the capacity to cause harm. He reflects on longstanding interconnections between health and violence.
Colin Webster is an Associate Professor in the Classics Program at UC Davis. His research has explored how tools structure ancient Greek and Greco-Roman conceptions of the body, as well as other aspects of ancient science, medicine, and technology. He is a current co-editor of the Rootcutter.
SAM Webinar
Book Promotion
(April 26, 2024 03:00-04:30PM EST)
Please join the next SAM webinar to celebrate the publication of Catherine Michael Chin’s Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (UC Press, 2024), and Rafael Rachel Neis’ When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (UC Press, 2023).
Together with the authors, Aileen R. Das will be discussing their books as well as their academic and art practices. The event will take place via Zoom, April 26, from 3-4:30pm EST. Registration is required, via the following link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AtnYV1yFSZSQyJo6sI7idg
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
We hope to see many of you there!
Image: Mosaic, Villa del Casale, Siciliy, Photo credit Andreas Wahra; Public Doman (Wikimedia Commons)
by John Wilkins
March 4, 2024
Many modern health problems stem from abundance and overwork. In this essay, John Wilkins explores how Galen might help provide a solution to some contemporary health issues, and how the key to longevity and health might require less effort, rather than more.
Prof. John Wilkins is an emeritus professor at the University of Exeter. He has published on Greek tragedy, comedy, food discourses in antiquity, and Galen.
CFP - "Medical Modernities"
CFP - "Medical Modernities"
Society of Classical Studies 156th Annual Meeting
JANUARY 2-5, 2025
PHILADELPHIA
Call for Papers for Panel Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Medicine
“Medical Modernities”
Organized by Aileen Das (University of Michigan) and Calloway Scott (University of Cincinnati)
When reflecting on the causes for the errors in Galen’s writings, the medieval Islamicate physician-philosopher Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. c. 925 CE) proposes in his Doubts about Galen (Koetschet 2019) that the ‘arts never cease progressing towards and approaching perfection’. Additional discoveries, he continues, are more easily reached because ‘what took the ancients a long time to find out comes to their successors very quickly’. Al-Rāzī seems to be exceptional in his forthrightness about the advantages contemporary, or ‘modern’, physicians have over their forebearers in the practice of their craft. There is a rich body of scholarship (e.g., von Staden 2009; Tieleman 2023) that has tracked how past Greco-Roman doctors such as Galen himself choose to align themselves with famous precursors, notably Hippocrates and Plato, to construct their expertise, even when their own theories respond critically to these authorities. This panel invites papers that consider how physicians across time and in various antiquities mobilize the medical past to define their contribution to their respective medical tradition(s). Papers could, for example, focus on how ancient doctors position themselves in relation to their modern contemporaries as opposed to past practitioners. For instance, a contribution could contextualize the Hippocratic writers’ own understandings of medicine’s capacity to be completed in relation to other fifth-century BCE notions of the nature of ‘art’ (technē). A more expansive approach might pursue how medical traditions construct their ‘modernity’ against the perceived past of ‘Others’, such as Greek modernity as opposed to Egyptian antiquity. Alternatively, a general line of inquiry could explore how doctors conceive of medicine’s chronology: what constitutes the medical past, present, and future?; is it a closed tradition capable of reaching perfection, as al-Rāzī suggests, or is it open-ended? We also encourage submissions that approach this topic from a presentist angle: how do biomedical practitioners today invoke the medical past in their archaeologies of certain diseases or methodologies? Along this line, papers could tackle the ethically fraught issue of retrospective diagnosis, where modern physicians or historians attempt to interpret in biomedical terms what ancient actors suffered from based on (primarily) textual and material evidence. What pedagogical purpose does retrospective diagnosis serve, if any, in the teaching of the medical past? How is retrospective diagnosis an outcome of modern divisions in the academy: does this type of scholarship replicate disciplinary silos, in which doctors and historians produce their own separate histories of medicine, or encourage new disciplinary configurations?
Abstracts must be no more than 500 words, not including bibliography, and should contain the following information:
a clear initial statement of purpose,
a brief explanation of the abstract's relationship to the previous literature on the topic, including direct citations of any important literature
a summary of the argumentation
some examples to be used in the argumentation.
The abstract should make it clear that the paper is suitable for oral presentation within a 20-minute time limit. For full details, please see the SCS Guidelines for Authors of Abstracts.
Please send anonymized abstracts (no personal details in the abstract or accompanying document) by email to Aileen Das (University of Michigan) at ardas@umich.edu by March 15, 2024. The organizers will review all submissions anonymously, and their decision will be communicated to the authors of abstracts by April 5, 2024.
Works Cited
Koetschet, Pauline (2019). Abū Bakr al-Rāzī «Doutes sur Galien». Berlin: De Gruyter.
Tieleman, Teun (2023). ‘Galen Between Medicine and Philosophy”, in Aileen R. Das (ed.), Galen’s Humanistic Medicine. Göttingen, Mohr Siebeck, 127–134.
Von Staden, Heinrich (2009) ‘Staging the Past, Staging Oneself: Galen on Hellenistic Exegetical Traditions’, in Chris Gill, Tim Whitmarsh, and John Wilkins (ed.), Galen and the World of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 132–56.
Heidi Marx is a professor in the Religion Department at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg). Her main research is in the philosophy and medicine of Late Antiquity, and she has just published, along with Kristi Upson-Saia and Jared Secord, Medicine, Health, and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean (500 BCE– 600 CE): A Sourcebook.
"Two horsemen aiming their lances, from Manual on the Arts of Horsemanship" (Nihayat al-su’l wa al-umniya fi ta‘allum ‘amal al-furusiyya) by al-Aqsara'i, Copied by `Umar b. `Abdallah b. `Umar al-Shafi’i, Cairo, Egypt. Chester Beatty, Ar 5655.116
"Two horsemen aiming their lances, from Manual on the Arts of Horsemanship" (Nihayat al-su’l wa al-umniya fi ta‘allum ‘amal al-furusiyya) by al-Aqsara'i, Copied by `Umar b. `Abdallah b. `Umar al-Shafi’i, Cairo, Egypt. Chester Beatty, Ar 5655.116
In the middle of his 10th century medical handbook Kitāb al-Manṣūrī fī al-ṭibb, al-Razi describes how to keep a army healthy while on campaign. Zsuzsanna Csorba outlines al-Razi's recommendations and examines how the details missing from his account can speak loudly about the realities of war and disaster, both in his time and our own.
Zsuzsanna Csorba is a researcher of the history of medieval Islamicate medicine with particular focus on travel medicine and manuscript studies at the Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies (Hungary).
CFP-"(New) Materialities of Medicine"
CFP-"(New) Materialities of Medicine"
Society of Classical Studies 155th Annual Meeting
January 4-7, 2024
Chicago, Illinois
Call for Papers for Panel Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Medicine
“(New) Materialities of Medicine”
Organized by Colin Webster (UC Davis) and Aileen Das (Michigan)
The new materialist turn in the humanities has returned focus to embodied experiences, physical infrastructure, and tangible things. Although many studies in ancient medicine remain resolutely bound to texts and philological methodologies, the orientation of healing towards a somatic object, however construed and conceptualized, has kept physical realities a perpetual, if sometimes uncomfortable, presence in the discipline. The publication of Lawrence Bliquez’s The Tools of Asclepius (Brill 2014) made the implements of Greek and Greco-Roman medicines more easily accessible to scholars, while Debby Sneed’s discussion of accessibility ramps in healing cults, or Jane Draycott’s surveys of prosthetics, have made materiality a vivid access point to ancient experiences of health, illness, and disability. How can continued work on recipes, and materia medica help expand entryways into the past? How can we rethink what materiality might mean within ancient theoretical frameworks that consider sympathy, celestial and solar “influences,” and the spoken/sung word within physical terms? What about votives, reliquaries, and other religious objects? How can we incorporate these articles of healing practice within broader material accounts of health and illness? The recent passing of Bruno Latour might also serve as call to reframe ancient medicine around non-human agents, such as plants, whose survival was ensured—and sometimes endangered—as a result of their bioactive properties. How can we revisit the relationship between theoretical and material things, especially since lived physical realities are themselves entangled with and constructed by conceptual, social, and linguistic frames, as new materialist approaches have revealed? Physical objects also cross borders and time periods, operating as proxies for the spread of ideas as well as indicators of lived practices. Can centering such objects help us cross cultural and linguistic boundaries to create new, productive, global histories of medicine? What about medical objects that help up cross temporal, as well as spatial boundaries? How should we think about implements that operated within multiple medical frameworks? Does materiality look different in Greece, Rome, Egypt, Assyro-Babylonia, Persia, India, or elsewhere? How should we think about material transmission of knowledge in the form of manuscripts alongside sustained and lived material practices? The organizers invite contributions on any aspect of the materials and materiality of ancient medicine, with special interest in papers that present reflect on how their approaches help reframe older theoretical issues, or present vivid illustrations of how material objects can form the center of investigations into medicines of the past.
Abstracts must be no more than 500 words, not including bibliography, and should contain the following information:
a clear initial statement of purpose,
a brief explanation of the abstract's relationship to the previous literature on the topic, including direct citations of any important literature
a summary of the argumentation
some examples to be used in the argumentation.
The abstract should make it clear that the paper is suitable for oral presentation within a 20-minute the time limit. For full details, please see the Guidelines for Authors of Abstracts.
Please send anonymized abstracts (no personal details in the abstract or accompanying document) by email to Colin Webster (UC Davis) at cwebster@ucdavis.edu by March, 17, 2023. The organizers will review all submissions and communicate their decision by March 27, 2023.
Works Cited
Bliquez, Lawrence (2014). The Tools of Asclepius: Surgical Instruments in Greek and Roman Times. Boston/Leiden: Brill.
Draycott, Jane (2019). Prostheses in Antiquity. London/New York: Routledge.
Sneed, D. (2020). The architecture of access: Ramps at ancient Greek healing sanctuaries. Antiquity, 94 (376), 1015-1029.
Image: Detail from Colchicum Autumnale in Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (Otto Wilhelm Thomé), 1885.
Public Domain (Wikipedia Commons).
Slavery and Pharmacology: Theophrastus on the poisonous root ephemeron
Slavery and Pharmacology: Theophrastus on the poisonous root ephemeron
by Svetlana Hautala
October 4, 2022
A brief discussion of poisons and their antidotes in Theophrastus' History of Plants touches upon the use of ephemeron (meadow saffron) by "angry slaves." Hautala explores how this passing reference suggests that botanical and pharmacological knowledge circulated within communities of enslaved people.
Dr Svetlana Hautala is a researcher of the anthropology of the ancient world with affiliation at the University of Oulu.
Society of Classical Studies 154th Annual Meeting
Society of Classical Studies 154th Annual Meeting
JANUARY 5-8, 2023
JANUARY 5-8, 2023
NEW ORLEANS
NEW ORLEANS
Call for Papers for Panel Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Medicine
Call for Papers for Panel Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Medicine
“Addiction, Dependency, and Habit”
“Addiction, Dependency, and Habit”
Organized by Colin Webster (UC Davis) and Aileen Das (Michigan)
Organized by Colin Webster (UC Davis) and Aileen Das (Michigan)
The opioid crisis has been devastating American families for almost two decades now, but despite its incredible human toll, it has barely made a ripple in academic debates, even as we enter another revolution in the use of psychotropic drugs to treat issues of mental health. We live in the conceptual shadow of moralizing prohibitions, the war on drugs, the medicalization of substance abuse, and the consequences of all these approaches. This panel seeks to explore the discourses around addictions, habits, and dependencies in antiquity, attempting to analyze these issues without the familiar frames of modern psychology and modern biomedicine. How were such issues conceptualized in antiquity? Without the categories of “psychoactive” or “psychotropic” substances, what counts as a problematic substance dependency? The Lotus-eaters of the Odyssey (Od. 9.82–104) stand as an early warning against pharmacologically induced bliss. Yet, ancient physicians frequently prescribed drugs that are high-risk for habit-formation, most notably opium and alcohol. Marcus Aurelius reportedly consumed the opium-containing drug theriac every day, and this “habit” [ethos] both created a potential addiction and allowed him to endure the hardships of military campaign (Gal. De antidotis 14.4K; cf. Diod. Sic. 71.6.3–4). Mithridates, in order to keep himself immune to poison, consumed toxic substances every day so that, as Pliny says, “he might render them harmless through habit itself [consuetudine ipse]” (Pl. NH 24.3.6; cf. Gal. De antidotis 14.4K). What does it mean when medical treatments produce dependencies or create harms? What are the dangers presented by long-term therapeutic interventions? How can we think about these issues using disability and chronic illness as frames, where the boundary between addictions and life-improving treatments is even less clear? Moreover, regimen-based medical approaches enforce near-constant attention to health in a way that itself flirts with the pathological. Eating-for-health can easily slide into a compulsive eating disorder. How do philosophical and medical notions of habit, dependency and immoderation interact? Is “moderation” the only morally-tinged principle guiding medical consumption patterns? Beyond philosophy, are there literary or mythic reflections on the dangers or benefits of pharmacological or medical dependencies? How do intraregional and intracultural drug trades shape attitudes toward particular substances? How do religious rituals involving pharmacological and therapeutic substances structure their use more broadly, either mitigating or promoting dependency? How did the prevalence of wine in Greek medicine affect its reception within Islamic tradition? Proposed papers are welcome to address these issues or any other related topics, including, but not limited to questions of chronic illness, pain, mortality, harm-reduction, risk-assessment, mental illness, gender, economics, and trade, whether in Greek, Roman, or other pre-modern contexts. Please send abstracts that follow the guidelines for individual abstracts (see the SCS Guidelines for Authors of Abstracts) by email to Colin Webster (UC Davis) at cwebster@ucdavis.edu by March, 25, 2022. Ensure that the abstracts are anonymous. The organizers will review all submissions anonymously, and their decision will be communicated to the authors of abstracts by March 31, 2022.
The Rootcutter is coming!
The Rootcutter is coming!
THE ROOTCUTTER, the blog for the Society for Ancient Medicine and Pharmacology, invites pitches for paid essays for an inaugural series that addresses connections between ancient and modern medicines. Essays should explore any aspect of ancient medicine broadly construed (e.g., including, but not limited to healing in the Mediterranean, Middle East, pre-modern China, India, and pre-Colombian South America), ideally through engagement with a clear and accessible primary source (e.g., image, object, short excerpt). Our intended audience includes historians and scientists, healthcare professionals and consumers, researchers and students. We hope that these essays will create a robust framework for applying key insights from classical reception studies to the history of medicine in antiquity and its relationship to modern medical theories and practices. Details can be found here.
New Book Series:
New Book Series:
Routledge Studies in Ancient Disabilities is a series dedicated to the investigation of new perspectives, the application of new approaches, and the promotion of period-based and cross-cultural investigations of disability throughout antiquity. Extending beyond the core disciplines of ancient history, archaeology and classical studies, the series aims to provide a forum for scholars with diverse backgrounds, including bioarchaeology, biblical studies and contemporary disability studies, to explore the evidence for disabilities within communities extending from the Bronze Age to late Antiquity. Encouraging cross-disciplinary studies, the series aims to bring questions of disability and impairment into dialogue with those concerning status, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other lived experiences, as well as to consider how successive generations have received, appropriated, or reworked these forms of identity. Ultimately, the series seeks to expand the geographical, cultural, and chronological scope of work on ancient disabilities and broaden our understandings of physical impairment and mental and intellectual disabilities (and related conditions).
For further information about contributing to the series, please contact Dr Emma-Jayne Graham at emma-jayne.graham@open.ac.uk
New Book Series:
New Book Series:
Current Issues in Ancient Medicine (CIAM) makes available to a wide readership, both in print and digitally on Open Access, the results of current research on ancient medicine from antiquity to the Renaissance. The series publishes, in the major languages of global scholarly communication, not only monographs and collective volumes, but also critical editions, translations, and commentaries, all peer-reviewed by an international committee of readers. In the variety of its approaches, ranging from philology to the history of science and the history of ideas, this series reflects and speaks to the varied interests of the contemporary reader in ancient medicine.
Editors | Éditrices | Herausgeberinnen Brigitte Maire & Nathalie Rousseau Editorial Board | Comité scientifique | Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Arsenio Ferraces Rodríguez, Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Valérie Gitton-Ripoll, Alessia Guardasole, David R. Langslow, Marie-Hélène Marganne, Matteo Martelli, Anna Maria Urso Contacts | Kontakte brigitte.maire@unil.ch | nathalie.rousseau@sorbonne-universite.fr | a.neumann@schwabe.ch
EDITED BY NATALIE KÖHLE AND SHIGEHISA KURIYAMA
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