Knowledge and Education in Classical Islam: Religious Learning between Continuity and Change offers fascinating new insights into key issues of learning and human development in classical Islam, including their shared characteristics, influence, and interdependence with historical, non-Muslim educational cultures.
Determining what has gone wrong in a malfunctioning body and proposing an effective treatment requires expertise. Since antiquity, philosophers and doctors have wondered what sort of knowledge this expertise involves, and whether and how it can warrant its conclusions. Few people were as qualified to deal with these questions as Galen of Pergamum (129–ca. 216). A practising doctor with a keen interest in logic and natural science, he devoted much of his enormous literary output to the task of putting medicine on firm methodological grounds. At the same time he reflected on philosophical issues entailed by this project, such as the nature of experience, its relation to reason, the criteria of truth, and the methods of justification. This volume explores Galen's contributions to (mainly scientific) epistemology, as they arise in the specific inquiries and polemics of his works, as well as their legacy in the Islamic world.
Hippocrates is a towering figure in Greek medicine. Dubbed the 'father of medicine', he has inspired generations of physicians over millennia in both the East and West. Despite this, little is known about him, and scholars have long debated his relationship to the works attributed to him in the so-called 'Hippocratic Corpus', although it is undisputed that many of the works within it represent milestones in the development of Western medicine. In this Companion, an international team of authors introduces major themes in Hippocratic studies, ranging from textual criticism and the 'Hippocratic question' to problems such as aetiology, physiology and nosology. Emphasis is given to the afterlife of Hippocrates from Late Antiquity to the modern period. Hippocrates had as much relevance in the fifth-century BC Greek world as in the medieval Islamic world, and he remains with us today in both medical and non-medical contexts.
This volume offers the first critical edition of Book I of the Arabic translation of Galen's Commentary on the Hippocratic Epidemics. The Arabic text is accompanied by an English translation and extensive notes on the differences between the Greek original and the Arabic version. The introduction outlines the complex history of the Greek and Arabic text and discusses the author, date and stylistic features of the Arabic translation.
Das vorliegende Buch widmet sich den Lebensumständen und der Berufsethik der arabischen Ärzte des Mittelalters. Auf der Grundlage zahlreicher biographischer, protreptischer, deontologischer und isagogischer Schriften untersucht Bürgel verschiedenste Aspekte der medizinischen Ausbildung, der Berufsausübung und der Rolle von Ärzten in der islamischen Gesellschaft. The present book investigates conditions of life and professional ethics of the Arab physicians in the Middle Ages. Based on a multitude of biographical, protreptic, deontological, and isagogic texts, Bürgel analyzes diverse aspects of medical education, professional conduct, and the role of doctors in Islamicate societies.
This volume offers a comprehensive biography of the Roman physician Galen, and explores his activities and ideas as a doctor and intellectual, as well as his reception in later centuries. Nutton’s wide-ranging study surveys Galen's early life and medical education, as well as his later career in Rome and his role as court physician for over forty years. It examines Galen's philosophical approach to medicine and the body, his practices of prognosis and dissection, and his ideas about preventative medicine and drugs. A final chapter explores the continuing impact of Galen's work in the centuries after his death, from his pre-eminence in Islamic medicine to his resurgence in Western medicine in the Renaissance, and his continuing impact through to the nineteenth century even after the discoveries of Vesalius and Harvey. Galen is the definitive biography this fascinating figure, written by the preeminent Galen scholar, and offers an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Galen and his work, and the history of medicine more broadly.
We make sense of love with fantasies, stories that shape feelings that are otherwise too overwhelming, incoherent, and wayward to be tamed. For love is a complex, bewildering, and ecstatic emotion covering a welter of different feelings and moral judgments. Drawing on poetry, fiction, letters, memoirs, and art, and with the aid of a rich array of illustrations, historian Barbara H. Rosenwein explores five of our most enduring fantasies of love: like-minded union, transcendent rapture, selfless giving, obsessive longing, and insatiable desire. Each has had a long and tangled history with lasting effects on how we in the West think about love today. Yet each leads to a different conclusion about what we should strive for in our relationships. If only we could peel back the layers of love and discover its “true” essence. But love doesn’t work like that; it is constructed on the shards of experience, story, and feeling, shared over time, intertwined with other fantasies. By understanding the history of how we have loved, Rosenwein argues, we may better navigate our own tumultuous experiences and perhaps write our own scripts.
The Hippocratic texts and other contemporary medical sources have often been overlooked in discussions of ancient psychology. They have been considered to be more mechanical and less detailed than poetic and philosophical representations, as well as later medical texts such as those of Galen. This book does justice to these early medical accounts by demonstrating their richness and sophistication, their many connections with other contemporary cultural products and the indebtedness of later medicine to their observations. In addition, it reads these sources not only as archaeological documents but also in the light of methodological discussions that are fundamental to the histories of psychiatry and psychology. As a result of this approach, the book will be important for scholars of these disciplines as well as those of Greek literature and philosophy, strongly advocating the relevance of ancient ideas to modern debates.
This book examines the two chief anatomical and physiological embodiment theories of voluntary animal motion, which I call the cardiosinew and cerebroneuromuscular theories of motion, from the time of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) to that of Mondino (d. A.D. 1326). The study of animal motion commenced with the ancient Greek natural scientist Aristotle who wrote the monograph 'On the motion of animals' (De motu animalium). Subsequent inquiries into voluntary animal motion may be found in a variety of Greek, Latin, and Arabic compendia, commentaries, and encyclopedias throughout the ancient and medieval periods. The motion of animals was considered relevant to natural philosophers and theologians investigating the nature of the soul, and to physicians seeking to discover the causes of disorders of voluntary movement such as epilepsy and tetany. The book fills a gap in the scholarly literature concerned with pre-modern studies of the anatomical and physiological mechanisms of will and bodily movement. The accompanying photographs of my own anatomical dissections illuminate ancient and medieval conceptual, empirical, and experimental methods of anatomical and physiological research.
In The Tools of Asclepius Lawrence Bliquez provides a comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of the surgical instruments and paraphernalia used by Greco-Roman pharmacists, physicians and surgeons.
