Medical Understandings Of Emotions In Antiquity

This volume focuses on the under-explored topic of emotions' implications for ancient medical theory and practice, while it also raises questions about patients' sentiments. Ancient medicine, along with philosophy, offer unique windows to professional and scientific explanatory models of emotions. Thus, the contributions included in this volume offer comparative ground that helps readers and researchers interested in ancient emotions pin down possible interfaces and differences between systematic and lay cultural understandings of emotions. Although the volume emphasizes the multifaceted links between medicine and ancient philosophical thinking, especially ethics, it also pays due attention to the representation of patients' feelings in the extant medical treatises and doctors' emotional reticence. The chapters that constitute this volume investigate a great range of medical writers including Hippocrates and the Hippocratics, and Galen, while comparative approaches to medical writings and philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, dwell on the notion of wonder/admiration (thauma), conceptualizations of the body and the soul, and the category pathos itself. The volume also sheds light on the metaphorical uses of medicine in ancient thinking.

This volume introduces scholarly discussion of emotions' importance for ancient medicine. Although individual emotions and emotion scripts in literary and non-literary sources of evidence have attracted much scholarly attention in the field of class

Introduction: What were Emotions? Definitions and Understandings -- 1. Medical and Scientific Understandings -- 2. Religion and Spirituality -- 3. Music and Dance -- 4. Drama -- 5. The Visual Arts -- 6. Literature -- 7. In Private: The Individual and the Domestic Community -- 8. In Public: Collectivities and Polities -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

The contributions of this volume discuss the interfaces between memory and emotions in ancient literature, social life, and philosophy. They explore the ways in which memories intersect with emotions in the epics of Homer and Virgil, the importance of memory for the emotions scripts employed by public speakers to enhance the persuasiveness of their arguments, and ‘cultural memory’ in Philostratus’ Heroicus. Contributions that focus on aspects of ancient societies and politics investigate memory and emotions in the Bacchic-Orphic gold leaves, the importance of memories on inscriptions commemorating private and public emotions, and the ways in which emotive memories enhanced the monumentalizing project of Herodes Atticus in Greece. The essays emphasizing philosophical approaches to memory and emotions discuss Aristotle’s biological treatises and Augustine’s deployment of nostalgia and autobiographical narrative in the wider frame of his didactic programme. Modern approaches to embodied cognition are also employed to shed light on how memories attached to our bodily experiences can enhance the interpretation of Roman literature.

This volume provides an overview of some of the salient aspects of emotions and their role in life and thought of the Greco-Roman world, from the beginnings of Greek literature and history to the height of the Roman Empire. This is a wide remit, dealing with a wide range of sources in two ancient languages, and in the full range of contexts that are covered by the format of this series. The volume's chapters survey the emotional worlds of the ancient Greeks and Romans from multiple perspectives – philosophical, scientific, medical, literary, musical, theatrical, religious, domestic, political, art-historical and historical. All chapters consider both Greek and Roman evidence, ranging from the Homeric poems to the Roman Imperial period and making extensive use of both elite and non-elite texts and documents, including those preserved on stone, papyrus and similar media, and in other forms of material culture. The volume is thus fully reflective of the latest research in the emerging discipline of ancient emotion history.

The contributions of this volume discuss the interfaces between memory and emotions in ancient literature, social life, and philosophy. They explore the ways in which memories intersect with emotions in the epics of Homer and Virgil, the importance of memory for the emotions scripts employed by public speakers to enhance the persuasiveness of their arguments, and ‘cultural memory’ in Philostratus’ Heroicus. Contributions that focus on aspects of ancient societies and politics investigate memory and emotions in the Bacchic-Orphic gold leaves, the importance of memories on inscriptions commemorating private and public emotions, and the ways in which emotive memories enhanced the monumentalizing project of Herodes Atticus in Greece. The essays emphasizing philosophical approaches to memory and emotions discuss Aristotle’s biological treatises and Augustine’s deployment of nostalgia and autobiographical narrative in the wider frame of his didactic programme. Modern approaches to embodied cognition are also employed to shed light on how memories attached to our bodily experiences can enhance the interpretation of Roman literature.

Galen's Health (De sanitate tuenda) was the most important work on daily exercise, diet and health regimes in antiquity. This book presents the first reliable scholarly translation of this work in English, alongside the related theoretical work Thrasybulus. A substantial introduction and thorough annotation elucidate both works and contextualize them within the framework of ancient health practices, ancient conceptions of the body and debates between medical and philosophical schools. The texts are of enormous interest from three points of view: (1) the wide range of insights they give into ancient everyday lifestyles, especially as regards diet, bathing, exercise and materia medica, as well as aspects of daily intellectual life; (2) the light they shed on ancient debates within medicine and philosophy, on fundamental conceptions of the body and the relationship between body and mind; (3) the enormous influence that Health had in mediaeval and early modern times.

Why is it so difficult to talk about pain? As we do today, the Greeks and Romans struggled to communicate their pain: this required a rich and subtle vocabulary which had to be developed over time. Pain Narratives traces the development of this language in literary, philosophical, and medical texts from across antiquity: poets, physicians, and philosophers contributed to an ever-growing lexicon to articulate their own and others’ feelings. The essays within this volume uncover the expanding Greco-Roman vocabulary of pain, analyse the medical discussions on pain symptoms, and explore the religious reinterpretations of pain concepts in late antiquity.