Scholars have made conflicting claims for Byzantine hospitals as medical institutions. Thi.s thesis attempts the first systematic examination of the evidence of the xenon texts, or xenonika of the study's title, on which all such claims must in part rest. The manuscript texts are also transcribed or edited, except for those of Romanos and Theophilos (the a1to9epa1teutuai) for which a schema of their combined chapter headings supports the argument that together they form the medical compilation of the xenon doctor, Romanos. A handlist briefly describes all manuscripts referred to in the study. The thesis is divided into two parts, Part I being a prolegomenon to the study, in Part II, of the xenonika. In the first chapter, the survival of these texts, the functions of the xenon deduced from them, xenon doctors as writers and users of texts, and xenon medical education are surveyed. In the second chapter, a range of Byzantine medical texts is examined to exemplify medical practice- in particular, that of surgery- in the period covered by this study; and to allow a comparison with the practice discernible from the xenon texts. The xenon-ascribed texts are discussed one by one in chapters 3-6 of Part II, the concluding chapter of which (7) depicts, principally on their evidence, the xenon as an institution in which doctors practised medicine in a manner prefiguring practice in a modern acute hospital. It is justly described as the ancestor of the modern hospital
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:404391 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Bennett, David Christopher |
| Publisher | Royal Holloway, University of London |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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