Search results for ""Author Iona McCleery""

Patient, disease and physician were the three corners of the ‘medical triangle’ according to one of the texts attributed to Hippocrates, a famous ancient Greek doctor. This volume, covering a period from roughly 800 BCE to 800 CE, examines and deconstructs these three aspects of ancient medicine in the Mediterranean world. It shows that, while physicians sought to assert themselves as experts in the medical art, they had to contend with numerous other healers whose methods, remedies and tools patients often favoured. It explores the ways in which civic entities, cities, kingdoms and empires, and their officials directly and indirectly shaped medical encounters and discoveries. It examines the interaction between medicine and the environment, non-human animals and plants. To attempt a cultural history of medicine in antiquity requires bringing together a wealth of sources: the texts attributed to Hippocrates, Galen and other medical authors are not neglected, but they are studied alongside other literary and historical works, letters on papyri, funerary inscriptions celebrating healers, surgical tools and bioarchaeological remains. While discussing the enduring cultural impact of classical Greek and Roman medicine in the West, through texts such as the Hippocratic Oath or names of diseases and types of medicines, this volume reveals the various ways in which health, disease and medical treatments were experienced diversely in the ancient world, according to gender, socio-economic class and ethnicity.

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The Middle Ages (c.500–c.1500) are wellknown for the growth of universities and urban regulations, plague pandemics, increasingly sophisticated ways of causing injury in warfare, and abiding frameworks for health and illness provided by religion. Increasingly, however, archaeologists, historians and literary specialists have come together to flesh out the daily lives of medieval people at all levels of society, both in Christian Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean. A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages follows suit, but also brings new approaches and comparisons into the conversation. Through the investigation of poems, pottery, personal letters, recipes and petitions, and through a breadth of topics running from street-cleaning, cooking and amulets to religious treatises and death rituals, this volume accords new meaning and value to the period and those who lived it. Its chapters confirm that the study of latrines, patterns of manuscript circulation, miracle narratives, sermons, skeletons, metaphors and so on, have as much to tell us about attitudes towards health and illness as do medical texts. Delving within and beyond texts, and focusing on the sensory, the experiential, the personal, the body and the spirit, this volume celebrates and critiques the diverse and complex cultural history of medieval health and medicine.

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