A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought.

Abstract

This book on ancient medicine offers a unique resource for historians of medicine, historians of psychology, and classicists - and also cultural historians and historians of art. The Hippocratic texts and other contemporary medical sources have often been overlooked when it comes to their approaches to psychology, which are considered more mechanical and less elaborated than contemporary poetic and philosophical representations, but also than later medical works, notably Galenic. This book aims to do justice to early medical accounts by illustrating their richness and sophistication, their links with contemporary cultural products, and the indebtedness of later medicine to their observations. The ancient sources are read not only as archaeological documents, but also in the light of methodological discussions that are fundamental in the history of psychiatry and the history of psychology.