Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Inaug.-diss.--Bonn. / Lebenslauf. Bibliograph p. 6-9. Notes.

The author's thesis, Uppsala; issued also without series title. / Bibliography: p. [5]-8.

The utilisation of minerals in Ancient Egyptian medicine from procurement through to use is examined here in a case study investigating the role of sodium salts. The sodium salts, salt and natron are two of the three most commonly used minerals in the Egyptian pharmacopeia. The results of the project are important to medical historians and archaeomineralogists alike in that they formulate a systematic understanding of the way in which minerals were used in medical and medically associated industries. Key sources of salt and natron were examined and the Wadi Natrun was identified as the probable main site of natrun exploitation. A comprehensive study conducted of this area involved examining sources of a historical geographical nature and analysis of mineralogical samples gathered from fieldwork in the Wadi Natrun. From the source of exploitation, natron and salt were sold to the Egyptians to be used in a number of everyday industries as well as for their use in medical and medically associated industries. Salt and natron were found to be used for their astringent and cleansing qualities, and are still being used in traditional medical formulations. Prescription replication showed that these substances worked effectively. Additional research into medically associated industries showed commonality between sodium salts use between all three industries investigated. The results of this research shows that a comprehensive study of the use of minerals in medicine could be established. Primary sites of exploitation of both salt and natron were identified, and minerals from theses sites were categorised and identified. The results showed that the chemical nature of these deposits had changed in the last 2000 years. The results also demonstrate reasons why the language surrounding the term natron needed to be revised. These results have implications for both archaeology and the history of medicine.

This dissertation explores how rabbinic texts produced between the first and sixth century CE related to medical practice, particularly the network of medical practitioners, medical care institutions, and seekers of medical care in late antique Palestine. Drawing on methodology from critical medical anthropology, the history of science, post-colonial studies, and disability studies, I examine Palestinian rabbinic sources within the broader cultural context of the Roman Empire and ancient medicine. Focusing on rabbinic depictions of doctors, midwives, patients, and institutions of medical care, I study the implications of these literary representations for understanding rabbinic medical epistemology, including the production of medical knowledge and medical decision-making, as well as the role rabbinic literature assigned to rabbis within these networks of medical care. As rabbinic literature constructed rabbis as legal experts and communal leaders, exploring the ways in which these texts presented rabbis as seeking medical care and advice from medical practitioners provides an important case study to consider how rabbinic texts both negotiated interactions with experts and sources of expertise other than their own and understood the contours of the rabbinic role within provincial life. My study highlights the fraught nature of seeking healing in the ancient world and examines how, in rabbinic literature, medical encounters between doctors and patients became performance sites for ethnic, religious, and gender difference. Indeed, rabbinic literature exhibited a profound distrust of medical practitioners and sought to undermine the expertise of doctors and midwives, presenting their treatments as dangerous or transgressive. I argue that, to combat this distrust, the texts constructed a unique role for the rabbis: intermediaries between seekers of care and medical practitioners. The texts imagined the rabbis evaluating the trustworthiness of doctors, consulting doctors alongside patients, and ensuring that the poor had access to affordable medical care. The introductory chapter frames the context of the dissertation, the methodologies employed, and addresses the historiography of rabbinic medicine. After the introduction, each chapter addresses the rabbinic relationship to a different component of ancient medical networks. The second chapter addresses the rabbinic representation of doctors, especially the rabbinic concern with the danger involved in seeking medical care and the resulting distrust of medical practitioners. I also examine the position of the rofe uman, both as an example of a medical practitioner who is seen as uniquely trustworthy and as a key mechanism within rabbinic medical decision-making. The third chapter studies rabbinic depictions of midwives, considering the representation of Jewish and non-Jewish midwives. The fourth chapter examines the role of patients alongside that of medical practitioners in the production of medical knowledge for adjudicating ritual law and the effects of gender in this equation. The fifth chapter turns to the question of ancient healthcare and the rise of medical care for the poor as a key political issue for the church in the fourth century CE. In this context, I draw on disability studies to analyze rabbinic views on the communal responsibility to provide care and support for people who are both impoverished and sick.

Divine healing has been often seen in opposition to human healing. The two spheres, have been considered as separate, both in space and in terms of elements involved. Asclepian sanctuaries have been mostly presented as domains of exclusively divine intervention, without any involvement of the human factor, possibly with the sole exception of dream interpretation. However, the written testimonies of temple cures, both those in the form of cure inscriptions dedicated in sanctuaries and the literary accounts of the incubation experience, give us reasons to suppose that the practical side of the functioning of the asklepieia could have assumed the involvement of human medicine, with the extent of this involvement differing in various epochs. Regardless of physicians' participation or its lack in the procedure, the methods applied in sanctuary healing appear to have evolved in parallel to the developments in medicine and their popular perception. Archaeological finds as well as the image of Asclepius as the god of medicine itself seem to confirm this. Nevertheless, by no means should these connections between the two spheres be treated as transforming the space of religious meaning into hospitals functioning under the auspices of a powerful god. Although acknowledging them does entail inclusion of human medicine within the space dedicated to Asclepius, it does not thereby deny the procedure of incubation its religious and metaphysical dimension. On the contrary, it shows that to the Greek mind divine and human healing were not mutually exclusive, but overlapped and coincided with each other, proving that the Greek sense of rationality was quite different from the modern and could comprise far more than what we call today "scientific thinking".

Plato’s Symposium masterfully depicts several different explanations of the phenomenon of Eros or love. The physician Eryximachus depicts Eros as a cosmic force that can bring harmony to a number of areas, from medicine and music to astronomy and divination. Most readers of the Symposium have read Eryximachus in an unflattering way, as a pompous know-it-all who fails to give a speech that meets either his high aspirations or his high opinion of himself. In this paper I argue that this reading of Eryximachus and his speech is unpersuasive. My defense of Eryximachus has three components: (1) Plato treats Eryximachus sympathetically in the Symposium and elsewhere, and has him deliver a modest and perfectly coherent speech about the science of Eros. (2) Eryximachus’s speech can only be properly understood if we read it in the context of Hippocratic medical theory, which infuses the speech throughout. (3) Outside the Symposium, Plato views medicine as a model technē, and health as a central philosophical concept; inside the Symposium, Plato has his mouthpiece Socrates give a speech on behalf of the priestess Diotima that agrees with Eryximachus on nearly every point of his speech. This indicates that Plato would have viewed Eryximachus’s speech quite favorably, and that modern readers should follow suit. I conclude by suggesting how this reading of Eryximachus should influence how we read the Symposium as a whole. / text

Texte remanié de : Dissertation (doctoral) : Ruhr-Universität Bochum : 1999. / Textes en allemand, arabe, et anglais. Bibliogr. p. 291-294.

This research project investigates the relationship between pain and the practices of explaining and narrating it to others. Current scholarship argues that the representation of suffering became, during the Imperial period, an increasingly effective and popular strategy for cultivating authority and that this explains the success of Christian culture’s representation of itself as a community of sufferers. One criticism of this approach is that the experience of pain has often been assumed, rather than analysed. Here, I investigate the nature of pain by attending to its intimate relationship with language; pain was connected to the strategies used to communicate that experience to others. I will show that writers throughout the Imperial period were concerned with questions about how to communicate pain and how that act of communication shaped, managed, and alleviated the experience. I investigate this culture along three axes. Part 1, ‘The Sublime Representation of Pain’, investigates the way different authors thought about the capacity of sublime language and rhetorical techniques such as enargeia to effectively communicate pain. I argue that for writers such as Longinus, the sublime offers an opportunity to replicate the traumatic experience of the pain sufferer in the audience or listener—pain is narrated to the audience through a traumatic communicative mode. Contrarily, I show how authors such as Plutarch and Galen were particularly concerned to desublimate the representation of pain, reducing the affective power of images of pain by promoting the audience’s conscious engagement with the text or representational medium. Part 2, ‘Medical Narratives’, examines a conflict between Galen and Aristides over the way language and narrative signified or referred to painful experiences. I show how both writers negotiate the way pain destroys and transcends ordered, structured, narrative by engaging in a process of narrative translation. I will illuminate the difference between scientific, diagnostic narratives which explain and rationalise pain experiences (in the case of Galen) and those which attempt to give witness to the nebulous, ineffable qualities of pain. In Part 3, ‘Narrating Cures’ I investigate ancient practices of psychotherapy. I show how various philosophical consolations were underpinned by an understanding of the power of pain to continually return and overwhelm the individual. I show further that the Greek romances engage in a type of talking cure: the novels use narration and story-telling to help assert the protagonists’ distance from their past traumatic experiences and, thus, allow the individual to overcome their painful past.

This dissertation deals with the study of ancient diseases mentioned in the historical period of the Scriptures in the region of Syro-Palestine. The definition, history, methodology and etymology of the terms relating to biblical diseases are discussed. Leprosy, syphilis, plague and anaemia amongst other diseases leave skeletal signs and lesions. Paleopathologists may reveal these diseases by studying skeletal remains of the population of Syro-Palestine. Criticisms and recommendations are offered for the practical paleopathologist, anthropologist or archaeologist. More interest should be taken in the study of coprolite in every new discovery of human remains. The scarcity of skeletal remains in the region is well known. The past and present law structure, the Halakah, may partly be to blame. The future of paleopathology worldwide is undisputedly the biochemical science of DNA analysis. With this new science the role for macromorphological examination may diminish. The diseases mentioned in the Bible are finding it increasingly difficult to hide behind the words in the Scriptures. / Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies / MA (Biblical Archaeology)