John Z Wee – författare

The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine explores how analogy and metaphor illuminate and shape conceptions about the human body and disease, through 11 case studies from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.

Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary is intended for historians of medicine and interpretation, and explores the dynamic between scholastic rhetoric and medical knowledge in ancient commentaries on a Mesopotamian Diagnostic Handbook.In line with commentators self-fashioning as experts of diverse disciplines, commentaries display intertextuality involving a variety of lexical, astronomical, religious, magic, and literary compositions, while employing patterns of argumentation that resist categorization within any single branch of knowledge. Commentators choices of topics and comments, however, sought to harmonize atypical language and ideas in the Handbook with conventional ways of perceiving and describing the sick body in therapeutic recipes. Scholastic rhetoricsupposedly unfettered to any disciplineserved in fact as a pretext for affirming current forms of medical knowledge.

Mesopotamian Commentaries on the Diagnostic Handbook Sa-gig is intended for specialists in cuneiform studies, and includes a cuneiform edition, English translation, and notes on medical lexicography for thirty Sa-gig commentary tablets and fragments, as well as a study on technical notations recurring in these commentaries. Within the Cuneiform Monographs series, this book represents a companion volume to Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2019).