Classical Medical Texts Research Articles

II Epigram in the Hellenistic World

As Chapter 1 ended, with questions of collecting and reception, so Chapter 2 begins. The imperial physician and prolific medical writer Galen (second to third century CE) was particularly interested in books and how people used, or misused, them. In the course of a discussion of how a particular set of annotations found their way into the Library of Alexandria's copy of a classic medical text, the third book of Hippocrates' Epidemics, he tells an interesting story to illustrate just how avid Ptolemy Euergetes, king of Egypt in the third century BCE, was as a book collector. He ordered that, whenever ships put in at the harbour of Alexandria, any books their passengers were carrying should be confiscated and copied; the copies were returned to the owners, and the originals were placed in the Library. Ptolemy went further than that, though: he borrowed the official copies of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the Athenian authorities on the security of a large deposit (fifteen talents), promising to make copies and return the originals.

Narrativity and Empiricism in Classical Indian Accounts of Birth and Death: The Mahābhārata and the Saṃhitās of Caraka and Suśruta

This paper will address the relationship between the Mahābhārata's representation of the physical processes of birth and death and similar material found in the classical ayurvedic texts of Caraka and Suśruta, which are roughly contemporaneous with the Sanskrit epic (second century BCE–second century CE). My primary source in the Mahābhārata (MBh) is the Anugītā, the second, and lesser known, dialogue between kṛṣṇa and Arjuna. This 'subsidiary Gītā is situated in the fourteenth book (parvan) of the epic, the Āśvamedhika parvan, which ostensibly deals with the horse sacrifice (aśvamedha) performed by the victorious king Yudhiṣṭhira after the conclusion of the great war. The relevant chapters of the Anugītā (MBh 14.17–18) contain fascinating and practically unknown material on the physical processes of birth and death, on embryology, and on physical dissolution. I will explicate this material, and then compare it with selected passages from the Caraka-Saṃhitā and the Suśruta-Saṃhitā. I shall then ask why, given considerable evidence for intertextuality between the MBh and the āyurvedic compendia, the classical medical texts did not include this interesting material and why the Mahābhārata did. In exploring this question, I must inquire into the scientific, or at least empirical, principles utilised in the medical texts that would force their authors to exclude the MBh material they probably knew well, in order to frame a particular kind of discourse.

Traditional Chinese medicine.

Foreign to many in the Western world, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is perhaps one of the most ancient healing arts known to humans.4, 5 Since the 1960s and 1970s, the practice of TCM has grown at a spectacular pace. During the early periods of expansion, skilled translators and quality source material pertaining to TCM were not readily available. As a result, there was a genuine misunderstanding of many classic texts in TCM. According to the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), TCM originated more than 3000 years ago. Its most popular modality, acupuncture, is perhaps the oldest and most commonly used medical procedure in the world. A wide variation in the practice of this and other Chinese medical modalities calls into question the idea that there are universally agreed-on criteria for choosing procedures based on arrived diagnoses. In the current culture that calls for certainty and reductionist thought, it is believed that the nearest thing to what is considered an objective body of theoretic and clinical knowledge is found deep within the Chinese classic tradition. The most recognized classic encyclopedic compilation, the Huang Di Nei Jing or The Yellow Emperor’s Classics of Internal Medicine was published in the third century BC. This great work, which has been used by practitioners to develop their skill over the last 2 millennia, illustrates and confirms the age of this traditional practice of medicine. Many who have attempted to use this classic medical text have found the Chinese language fraught with difficulty. To this end, translation has been met

The ideal prepuce in ancient Greece and Rome: male genital aesthetics and their relation to lipodermos, circumcision, foreskin restoration, and the kynodesme.

This study examines the evolution of Greek and Roman medical conceptualizations of preputial aesthetics, utilizing evidence found in classical medical texts as well as clues from literature, legal sources, and art. A conclusive picture emerges that the Greeks valued the longer prepuce and pathologized the penis characterized by a deficient prepuce--especially one that had been surgically ablated--under the disease concept of lipodermos. The medical conceptualization of lipodermos is also placed in the historical context of the legal efforts to abolish ritual circumcision throughout the Seleucid and Roman empires.

The hunt for Quesalid: Tracking Léevi-Strauss' shaman

Quesalid - the Kwakiutl shaman immortalized in Lévi-Strauss' “The sorcerer and his magic” - was, in reality, a very different individual to the one portrayed in that now classic medical (and wider) anthropological text. This article reveals how it is that we may identify the true Quesalid, telling something of his life, and shows him to have been a key figure in early American anthropology and the 'Culture and Personality' school, as well as an augur of many of the central debates within medical anthropology. The 'biography' of Quesalid's shamanic biography itself illustrates how individuals evolve into iconographic spectres, haunting anthropological literature with an existence of their own, an existence which comes to relate little or not at all to their actual lives. Ultimately, 'tracking' Quesalid elaborates certain issues surrounding informancy, theory production, and the nature of cultural authenticity itself.

The Bamboo Grove Monastery and Popular Gynecology in Qing China

The history of medicine in China is inextricably tied to the history of intellectual trends, popular beliefs, and social customs. Over the past few decades, historians have thoroughly effaced the old icon which depicted "traditional Chinese medicine" as a timeless corpus of ancient teachings, transmitted by a select group of erudite men. In its place stands a constantly changing landscape of medical practices and beliefs, shaped by healing experts and lay people alike, metamorphosing according to historical era and geographical location. 2 Prior to the twentieth century, there were no legal or professional regulations to distinguish the physician from the neighborhood herbalist or educated medical hobbyist. An untrammeled free market of medical ideas existed, where no one group enjoyed a monopoly over medical knowledge or legitimacy. It is true that educated physicians strove to elevate their status by championing the ideal of the ruyi (literatus-doctor), a scholarly practitioner whose authority rested on his profound mastery of classical medical texts. 3 These upper-class doctors disparaged other groups of healers as "quacks" (yongyi) and railed against the allegedly ignorant lay people who felt qualified to treat themselves or family members after leafing through a few medical books. 4 Historians recognize, however, that such elite physicians constituted only a tiny percentage of all healers, and it is not at all certain that the average medical [End Page 41] consumer took their admonitions to heart. Indeed, in the decentralized medical world of late imperial China, widespread confidence in amateur and popular medicine may have undermined ruyi claims to a privileged medical authority. Charlotte Furth's recent analysis of late Ming dynasty medical cases, for example, shows that patients and their families routinely challenged literati doctors' medical diagnoses and therapeutic strategies. The family home was the main arena in which healing activities took place, and here the judgments of male and female family members competed with those of scholarly doctors. Medical case records and literary accounts from the Ming and Qing all attest to the fact that sick people treated themselves, while also switching freely between different types of healers--physicians, monks, diviners, herbalists--when the expected cure was not forthcoming. As Furth observes, whether or not a doctor could make his views prevail ultimately depended on his ability to obtain the confidence of the household head. 5

Monastic incorporation of classical botanic medicines into the Renaissance pharmacopeia.

Ancient Greek physicians believed that health resulted from a balance of natural forces. Many, including Dioscorides, made compilations of plants and medicines derived from them, giving prominence to diuretics, cathartics and emetics. During the Roman Empire, although Greek physicians were highly valued, the Roman matron performed many medical functions and magic and astrology were increasingly used. In Judaic and later Christian societies disease was equated with divine disfavor. After the fall of Rome, the classical Greek medical texts were mainly preserved in Latin translation by the Benedictine monasteries, which were based around a patient infirmary, a herb garden and a library. Local plants were often substituted for the classical ones, however, and the compilations became confused and inaccurate. Greek medicine survived better in the remains of the Eastern Roman Empire, and benefitted from the influence of Arab medicine. Intellectual revival, when it came to Europe, did so on the fringes of the Moslem world, and Montpellier and Salerno were among the first of the new medical centers. Rather than relying on ancient experts, the new experimental method reported the tested effects of substances from identified plants. This advance was fostered by the foundation of universities and greatly aided by the later invention of the printing press, which also allowed wider dissemination of the classical texts.

Fundamentals of Radiology

Dr Lucy Frank Squire is joined by Dr Robert A. Novelline in revising and updating this classic medical student text on diagnostic radiology. The original 1964 edition was written specifically as an introduction to diagnostic radiology for medical students in their clinical years of training. The book concerns itself with teaching general principles of the subject, and it is not designed to be the reference book that the student might later wish to own in practice. This singleness of purpose made and makes this text unique. These traits, plus the author's skill, resulted in the largest-selling book published to date by Harvard University Press. Predictably, this edition will follow in the path of its predecessors. With this revision, the authors have introduced computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging and have added 330 new illustrations. Yet with skillful rewriting and deletion, the increase in the number of pages has been held

A set of silver dental instruments from the New Milton Collection.

This short paper studies a set of ten silver instruments belonging to the New Milton Collection, which are believed to be dental and of Roman date. A brief history of the set is given, also a description of each instrument together with suggested name and function, based upon the accounts of dental procedures recorded in classical medical texts. In an attempt to determine the antiquity of the set, results of non-destructive tests upon two of the instruments are compared with those of metal artefacts of authenticated date. In addition, stylistic comparisions are made with ancient instruments in museum collections, and representations of instruments upon ancient stelae and in medical manuscripts.

Hereditary Yaws

In speaking today on the subject of congenital yaws I am aware of the rashness of discussing a condition which is said not to exist both by the older classical medical texts and by more recent medical literature.Stitt (1) states “It is quite obvious that there does not exist a congenital form of Yaws.” We read in Botreau Roussel (2) “Yaws is neither hereditary nor congenital.” In Osler's Modern Medicine (3) we find the same assertion with the same terms. Patrick Manson (4) writes: “Yaws is neither hereditary nor congenital. A woman suffering with yaws during her pregnancy does not give birth to a child having this affection, nor will the child develop the disease later on, unless it is infected after birth through a skin lesion.”Bertin (5), a physician of the French colony of Santo Domingo in a study on yaws in 1786 writes: “Yaws, as the venereal diseases and others, is transmitted through heredity.