Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West

"We finally have a sorely needed volume of primary sources that illustrates the breadth, depth, vibrancy, and development of premodern medical thinking. Winston Black has assembled a remarkable collection of key texts and provided clear and concise introductions that contextualize the sources and highlight their significance. Unfamiliar terms and references are conveniently explained in the margins, making the already clear translations even more readable. Any course that addresses premodern health or healing will find this coherent, expertly curated, and accessible set of sources absolutely essential." -- Frederick Gibbs, University of New Mexico "Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of primary-source collections dealing with the history of science and medicine. Providing an eclectic range of numerous documents from the earliest civilizations in the Mediterranean basin through the central Middle Ages, the book can serve as a general grounding in the subject, as a supplemental text for survey courses, or as a source for further individualized research. The source texts--many of which are translated into English for the first time--come prefaced with helpful thematic overviews, and each text receives its own introduction. Medicine and Healing presents a nuanced yet manageable selection of sources; students will find it eminently fascinating." -- Christine Senecal, Shippensburg University "Winston Black has chosen an intriguing array of primary sources on themes such as religious healing, ancient Egyptian medicine, the Islamicate world, surgery, women's medicine, and charms and magical medicine. Clear headnotes, careful definitions of technical or unfamiliar terms, and topic overviews will help undergraduates and new graduate students alike. Teaching early medicine just got easier!" -- Mary Fissell, Johns Hopkins University "In Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West: A History in Documents, Black draws on his strengths as a historian of medicine and religion to provide a concise and accessible treatment of the development of the medical arts from Antiquity to the Late Medieval Period. ... As it is meant as an introduction to the topic, Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West does not stray from its path and for this reason it is a welcome exemplar of what can be achieved in future contributions of introductory works on the history of science and medicine." -- Michael Lawson University of California-Berkeley, Journal of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science

Winston Black is Lecturer in Medieval History at Clark University.

Introduction Chronology Questions to Consider Documents 1. The Earliest Medical Writings of the Near East and Mediterranean (ca.2000-700 BCE) 1. The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus 2. Diagnosis in Ancient Egypt: The Ebers Papyrus 3. A Babylonian Spell against Fever 4. Plague as Divine Punishment in Homer's Iliad 5. Gods as the Source of Disease: Hesiod, Works and Days 6. Violence and Healing in Homeric Greece 2. Medicine and Healing among the Ancient Greeks (ca.500 BCE - 200 CE) Rational Medicine in the Age of Hippocrates 7. Hippocratic Corpus, Nature of Man 8. Plato on the Nature of Disease: Timaeus 9. Thucydides and the Plague of Athens, 430 BCE 10. Hippocratic Corpus, Aphorisms 11. Hippocratic Corpus, Airs, Waters, and Places 12. Case Histories the Hippocratic Epidemics Asclepius, the God of Physicians 13. The Hippocratic Oath 14. Pindar: Apollo leaves Asclepius with Chiron the Centaur 15. Celsus celebrates Asclepius as a Man 16. A Greek anatomical votive plaque 17. Aelius Aristides dreams of Asclepius 18. An Egyptian God in Greek Dress in a Hellenistic Papyrus 3. Professional Medicine in the Roman Mediterranean (ca.1-300 CE) 19. Galen, On the Medical Sects 20. Aretaeus the Cappadocian on the Difficult Case of Tetanus 21. Rufus of Ephesus, Medical Questions: Interrogation of the Patient 22. Celsus: A Healthy Regimen without Doctors 23. Dioscorides and the Science of Pharmacology 24. Galen, the Boastful Practitioner: On the Affected Places 25. Galen, On Black Bile: Praising and Rewriting Hippocrates 26. Herodian on a plague in the Roman Empire 4. Practical Medicine for the Roman Family and Home (ca.100-500 CE) 27. Varro, De re rustica: An early germ theory? 28. Vegetius, De re militari: Preserving the Health of Imperial Troops 29. The Legend of Agnodike, a Greek midwife and physician 30. Soranus of Ephesus: Instructions for Midwives 31. Cato the Elder's Roman remedies: Cabbage, Wine, and Magic 32. Pliny the Elder's homespun medicine: Remedies derived from Wool 33. Popular medicine in verse: Liber medicinalis 5. Distilling Classical Medicine in Late Antiquity (ca.300-700 CE) 34. Oribasius: A Galenic Diet in the Later Roman Empire 35. Anthimus to King Theoderic, On the Observance of Diet 36. A Medieval Primer in Ancient Medicine by St. Isidore of Seville 37. Medicine of Pliny for the Informed Traveler 38. The Herbarius of Apuleius Platonicus 39. Marcellus and His Empirical Handbook of Medicines 40. The Drug Theory of Paul of Aegina 6. Medical Diversity in the Early Middle Ages (ca.600-1000 CE) Monotheism and Medicine 41. The Oath of Asaph, a Jewish Physician's Oath 42. A Christianized Hippocratic Oath 43. Medicine and Diet in the Rule of St. Benedict 44. Roman Doctors as Christian Saints: Cosmas and Damian 45. Islamic Medicine of the Prophet: Sunan Abu Duwud Early Medieval Responses to Plague and Pestilence 46. Evagrius Scholasticus on the Plague of Justinian 47. Gregory of Tours on Epidemic Disease and the Sickness of Kings 48. A Votive Mass against Pestilence Old English Medicine: Superstition or Empiricism? 49. The Nine Herbs Charm, from the Old English Lacnunga 50. Bald's Leechbook: Herbal remedies for eye problems 51. Medical Prognostics in Anglo-Saxon England 7. The Arabic Tradition of Learned Medicine (ca.900-1400 CE) 52. An Introduction to Rational Medicine: Hunayn ibn Ishaq's Isagoge 53. Avicenna, The Canon of Medicine 54. Avicenna on Prognosis through Urine 55. Maimonides and Galen on the Meaning of the Pulse 56. Al-Razi, Case Studies in the Spirit of Hippocrates 57. Usamah ibn Munqidh: A Muslim view of Frankish Medicine 58. Al-Razi on Diagnosis and Treatment for Smallpox and Measles 59. Pilgrim Medicine: Qust? ibn L?q? on "The Little Dragon of Medina" 60. Ancient Greeks in Later Medieval Prophetic Medicine: al-Tibb al-nabawi 8. Learned Medicine in High Medieval Europe (ca.1000-1400 CE) Humours, Complexion, and Uroscopy 61. A Clever Duke and a Cleverer Physician in the Tenth Century 62. Constantine the African