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

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

Edited By Ulrike Steinert

Edition 1st Edition

First Published 2020

eBook Published 21 July 2020

Pub. location London

Imprint Routledge

DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203703045

Pages 338 pages

eBook ISBN 9780203703045

SubjectsHumanities, Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing & Allied Health, Social Sciences

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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |44 pages

Introduction

Sickness, cultural classifications and local epistemologies

WithUlrike Steinert, Elisabeth Hsu

PDF 1.30MB

part Part I|62 pages

Disease concepts and healing

New approaches to knowledge and practice in premodern medical texts and traditions

chapter 1|10 pages

Distinctive issues in the history of medicine in antiquity

WithGeoffrey E. R. Lloyd

PDF 0.18MB

chapter 2|27 pages

How to read a recipe?

Working backwards from the prescription to the complaint

WithElisabeth Hsu

PDF 1.35MB

chapter 3|23 pages

Experiencing the dead in ancient Egyptian healing texts

WithRune Nyord

PDF 0.35MB

part Part II|151 pages

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

chapter 4|13 pages

Types of diagnoses in Papyrus Ebers and Smith

WithSusanne Radestock

PDF 0.29MB

chapter 5|18 pages

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

WithJuliane Unger

PDF 0.31MB

chapter 6|55 pages

Disease concepts and classifications in ancient Mesopotamian medicine

WithUlrike Steinert

PDF 0.71MB

chapter 7|9 pages

Classification of illnesses in the Hippocratic Corpus

WithElizabeth Craik

PDF 0.18MB

chapter 8|15 pages

The delicacy of the rabbinic asthenes

Sickness, weakness or self-indulgence?

WithAaron Amit

PDF 0.32MB

chapter 9|14 pages

The Paradise of Wisdom

Streams of tradition in the first medical encyclopaedia in Arabic

WithLucia Raggetti

PDF 0.30MB

chapter 10|25 pages

The Tree of Nosology in Tibetan medicine

WithKatharina Sabernig

PDF 0.77MB

part Part III|48 pages

Mental illness in ancient medical systems

chapter 11|18 pages

Disturbing disorders

Reconsidering the problem of ‘mental diseases’ in ancient Mesopotamia

WithM. Erica Couto-Ferreira

PDF 0.33MB

chapter 12|28 pages

Classification, explanation and experience

Mental disorder in Graeco-Roman antiquity

WithPeter N. Singer

PDF 0.38MB