Böcker i Medicine and the Body in Antiquity-serien

Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures puts historical illness concepts in cross-cultural perspective, investigating perceptions, constructions and experiences of health and illness, from antiquity to the 17th century.

In antiquity, selling pharmacological preparations and recipes could mean very big business indeed. The import and trade of exotic pharmacological ingredients, in particular those coming from India, has received some scholarly attention but the process whereby these ingredients were combined into desirable concoctions, advertised and sold has been more neglected. This monograph attempts to bridge the gap between ancient medical and socio-economic history, addressing an academic audience of both social and economic historians as well as historians of medicine and technology. It examines material from the fifth century BCE (the date of the first medical treatises included in the Hippocratic Corpus) to the seventh century (the century in which Paul of Aegina, the last of the early Byzantine medical authors, composed his work) with a particular focus on the period from the first century BCE to the third century CE.

The evidence of the ancient Greeks¿ interest in music therapy is scattered through Greek literature from its earliest beginnings. Music was considered to be a magic remedy yet the idea of a connection between musical structures (harmonia, rhythms) and the human constitution had already begun to emerge in the Archaic age and was well established by the second half of the fifth century BCE. Plato is the first source of the notion of musical ethos, according to which music can affect human beings because of its affinities with the soul. It is the Pythagoreans who are usually credited with the ¿invention¿ of the notions of musical ethos and catharsis yet these ideas depend on Neoplatonists such as Porphyry and Iamblichus. Drawing on sources from poetry and philosophy (the early Pythagoreans, Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists); musicology (Aristoxenus and Aristides Quintilianus); and medicine (the Hippocratic Corpus, Herophilus and Galen) this volume considers how the ancient Greeks thought about music and its healing properties for both body and soul.