Tools and the organism : technology and the body in ancient Greek and Roman medicine / Colin Webster.

  • Webster, Colin (Classicist)
Date:
2023
  • Books

About this work

Also known as

Technology and the body in ancient Greek and Roman medicine

Description

"Medicine is itself a type of technology, involving therapeutic tools and substances, and so one way to write the history of medicine is as the application of different technologies to the human body. In Tools and the Organism, Colin Webster argues that, over the course of antiquity, notions shifted about what type of object a body is, what substances constitute its essential nature, and how its parts interact. By following these changes and taking the question of technology into the heart of Greek and Roman medicine, Webster reveals how the body was first conceptualized as an "organism"-a functional object whose inner parts were tools [organa] that each completed certain vital tasks. Webster's approach provides both an overarching survey of the ways that technologies impacted notions of corporeality and corporeal behaviors and, at the same time, stays attentive to the specific material details of ancient tools and how they informed assumptions about somatic structures, substances, and inner processes. For example, by turning to developments in water-delivery technologies and pneumatic tools, we see how these changing material realities altered theories of the vascular system and respiration across Classical antiquity. Tools and the Organism makes the compelling case for why telling the history of ancient Greco-Roman medical theories, from the Hippocratics to Galen, should pay close attention to the question of technology. Selling points: Tour de force survey of ancient medicine First book to demonstrate how the body got its "organs" and what this has to do with ancient technologies For anyone interested in ancient culture, science, medicine, and technology."--From publisher.

Publication/Creation

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Physical description

xvi, 320 pages : black and white illustrations ; 24 cm

Contributors

Binding detail

Copy 1. Binding : Includes dust jacket.

Contents

Introduction. 0.1. Technologies and the consolidation of the body ; 0.2. Teleology, mechanism, vitalism, and technology ; 0.3. Analogies, metaphors, and models -- 1. Hippocrates and technological interfaces. 1.1. Corporeal composition without organs ; 1.2. Regimen and the body ; 1.3. Hippocrates's Nature of the Human ; 1.4. Medical implements and Hippocrates's Morb. 4/Genit./Nat. Pue. ; 1.5. Female corporeality and gynecological technologies -- 2. The origins of the organism. 2.1. Empedocles's clepsydra and the corporeal interior ; 2.2. Physikoi on corporeal tools ; 2.3. Plato's Timaeus and competing technological heuristics ; 2.4. Respiration, the clepsydra, and irrigation pipes of the fifth century BCE ; 2.5. Irrigation and water distribution technologies -- 3. Aristotle and the emergence of the organism. 3.1. The soul and the organism ; 3.2. The tools of the heart ; 3.3. The journey of the blood ; 3.4. Automata and animal motion -- 4. The rise of the organism in the Hellenistic period. 4.1. The rise of anatomy ; 4.2. Herophilus of Chalcedon and dissection practices ; 4.3.. Herophilus's bellows ; 4.4. Erasistratus of Ceos and pneumatic pathologies -- 5. The organism and its alternatives. 5.1. Post-Erasistratean Hellenistic organa ; 5.2. The empiricist resistance ; 5.3. The infrastructure of Roman power ; 5.4. Asclepiades of Bithynia ; 5.5. Asclepiades and aqueducts ; 5.6. Methodism and pneumatism ; 5.7. Soranus and female corporeality in methodism -- 6. Galen and the technologies of the vitalist organism. 6.1. The return of anatomy ; 6.2. Galen of Pergamon and on the function of the parts ; 6.3. Technologies and the natural faculties ; 6.4. Vivisection and the vitalist body ; 6.5. Logical and material tools of the lemmatized body ; 6.6. The material technologies of vitalism.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-311) and index.

Languages

Subjects

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    BJK /WEB
    		Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780226828770
  • 0226828778