Greek Medical Literature And Its Readers From Hippocrates To Islam And Byzantium Petros Bourasvallianatos Sophia Xenophontos by Petros Bouras-vallianatos & Sophia Xenophontos 9781472487919, 1472487915 instant download after payment.

Over the last few decades there has been much scholarly work on ancient medical literature, but the general tendency has been to explore medical works for their technical content, or their function as (didactic) manuals for medical theory and practice. This edited volume aims to make a seminal contribution to the role of the audience in the contextualisation of Greek medical texts, by looking into the expectations, peculiarities, and needs of authors and readers. It examines for the first time the audience of particular Greek texts in different periods and reassesses medical treatises that have been neglected in current literature. It further raises new research questions on the readership of Greek medical literature and how this regulated and/or controlled the reception of these writings in contemporary and later societies, demonstrating that many important issues concerning the reception of Greek medical texts remain unexplored. The larger goal is to excite further interest, both in the particular thinkers and texts included here but also in the varied ways in which their works were revived, thus cultivating an appreciation of medical writing as a form of literature. The volume is divided into four sections according to the historical and cultural setting that frames the medical text(s) treated in each chapter, whether the original framework that gave birth to the text in question, or a different setting, into which Greek medical texts were then introduced or revived. Thus a number of contributions are concerned with medical texts of the Classical period, especially the Hippocratic corpus (Part I). The second group of chapters focuses on medical authors of the Imperial period, i.e. Galen and Ps.-Alexander of Aphrodisias. Chapters falling into Part III treat Greek medical works that were introduced in the Islamic world, and finally chapters in Part IV focus on the Byzantine reception of Greek medical literature.
ISBN : 9781472487919