Publisher's Synopsis
[Volume 2] The international congress Ancient Medicine in its Socio-Cultural Contextheld at Leiden University in April 1992 aimed at promoting an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to problems of health and disease in the Greco-Roman world. This approach envisaged the study of the place and the development of medical theory and practice against the background of ancient society, culture and mentality. At the same time attention was paid to the ways in which topics and images borrowed from medicine are used in non-medical contexts. In this way the congress intended to stimulate the comparison of recent results of a strictly medico-historical approach with contributions from classical philology, social history, archaeology, history of religion and philosophy as applied to the Ancient World. This book contains most of the papers read at the Congress, many of which have been revised and further elaborated in the light of the discussions they provoked. The following topics are addressed: - Individual and collective reactions to diseases - The place of medicine within the framework of ancient science and its relation to philosophy - Interactions between religion, magic and healing - The varied roles and status of doctors and other medical practitioners in their social environment - Women, children and sexuality - The role of medical themes in literature - Linguistic and literary aspects of medical texts
