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News
40 Years
Society for the Social History of
Medicine - Annual Conference 2010
The Society for the
Social History of Medicine Annual
Conference 2010 takes place in Durham
from Thursday 8th July until Sunday 11th
July 2010.
To view the
provisional programme please click
here.
Alexander von
Humbolt Professorship for Professor
Philip van der Eijk
The Humboldt Professorship is awarded to
scientists and scholars outside Germany,
enabling them to carry out a large-scale
research project at a German university.
It is awarded by the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation and funded by the
Federal German Ministry of Education. It
is one of the most prestigious European
academic prizes and is awarded to up to
ten researchers each year, usually in
the fields of natural sciences, medicine
and mathematics. A classicist and
medical historian, Professor van der
Eijk is the first ever successful
candidate from the humanities.
The Humboldt Professorship will support
a large programme of research based at
the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Focusing on classical medicine and its
reception in the Western medical
tradition, Professor van der Eijk will
address major questions about the
dialogue between medicine and
philosophy, medicine’s engagement with
the mind-body interface, the transfer of
medical knowledge, and the relationship
between medicine, moral values and
religion.
The new research programme will be
carried out in collaboration with
colleagues in Classics, Philosophy and
History at the Humboldt University, the
Free University and the Technical
University in Berlin, the Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science,
the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum project
of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Science, and the Medical History
Department of Berlin's Medical School ‘Charité’.
The project will build on, and be
closely connected to, the work Professor
van der Eijk has been doing at
Newcastle, and he will continue to be
involved in the research activities of
the Northern Centre for the History of
Medicine, in particular the Strategic
Award, the SSHM 2010 conference and the
Galen Programme Grant.
For further information see
http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/1070795.html
and
http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/1071283.html
Congratulations to Glenda McDonald
Congratulations to Glenda McDonald (Newcastle) on passing her viva for her PhD thesis on "Concepts and Treatments of Phrenitis in Ancient Medicine" on 11th August 2009.
The examiners were Professor Julian Hughes (Newcastle) and Professor Christopher Gill (Exeter). The thesis was supervised by Philip van der Eijk and Jonathan Andrews.
Glenda
took up an Andrew Mellon Research Fellowship at Columbia University New York as of September 2009, working with Professor William Harris on the history of mental illness in the ancient world.
She will be revising and expanding the thesis for publication as a monograph.
Book Publications
'A
Short History of the Drug Receptor
Concept' by Prull, C-R, Maehle, A H,
Halliwell, R F (Palgrave Macmillan 2009)
'Doctors,
Honour and the Law' by Maehle, A H
(Palgrave Macmillan 2009)
*
Wellcome Trust Research
Fellowship
Dr James Kennaway (formerly Stanford
University) has been awarded a 3-year
Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship to
work from January 2009 together with
Professor Holger Maehle and Dr Lutz
Sauerteig in the Centre for the History
of Medicine and Disease at Durham
University on a new project entitled
'Pathological Sounds: The History of
Music as a Threat to the Nerves'. Dr
Kennaway has also been successfully
nominated as a Wolfson Research
Institute Fellow.
*
Wellcome Trust Award 'Towards a Galen in English
Philip van der Eijk has been awarded a Programme Grant of £402,706 by the Wellcome Trust for the research project 'Towards a Galen in English'. The project will run for five years and employ two postdoctoral research associates (Peter Singer and Christine Salazar) and one editorial assistant.
The works of Galen of Pergamum (129-210 CE), 'the Prince of Physicians', are one of the most impressive monuments of Classical medicine. They comprise all areas of medicine, ranging from anatomy, physiology, pathology, psychiatry, dietetics, therapeutics and pharmacology to gynaecology, embryology and theory of reproduction. In addition, they cover theoretical, methodological and philosophical aspects fundamental to the acquisition, systematisation and communication of medical knowledge, such as logic, medical terminology, epistemology and theory of causation. And however voluminous and wide-ranging, they are bound together by an intrinsic, systematic and coherent (if eclectic) comprehensive theory of the human body, the human psyche, their place within the natural world, of the nature of medical knowledge and the methodology of its acquisition, validation and systematisation, and of the technical and ethical components of medical expertise. Galen's works were of enormous influence on the subsequent history of medicine, both in the West and in the East (and in Arabic medicine), and Galen's authority remained powerful until well into the 17th century.
More recently, Galen's works have also found strong resonance beyond the domain of medical history. Galen was, after all, not only a brilliant medic and prolific writer but also the court physician of several Roman Emperors, a keen public debater and dissector and an active participant in social and cultural life, first in Pergamum and subsequently in Rome. Hence it is not surprising that Galen's work commands a growing interest from classicists and ancient historians, students of ancient literature, philosophy and society, and his writings are being exploited as a rich source for the social, cultural and intellectual history of the early Imperial period and its reception in later times. Thus Galen's work represents an excellent example of how the study of ancient medical history can have a wider impact on other, related disciplines.
Yet Galen's works are difficult to access. Many of them are still not available in modern critical editions and only accessible in the 19th century edition by C.G. Kühn (with Latin translation), which is universally held to be unsatisfactory (and incomplete); and although there has recently been significant improvement, it is still the case that not more than 25% of his work is accessible in English translation.
This project aims to
address this situation. Its purpose is
to provide a co-ordinated series of
scholarly English translations of works
of Galen in a uniform format, providing
elaborate Introductions, Notes,
Bibliographies, Glossaries and Indices,
thus making Galen's work accessible also
to a non-specialist readership.
*
Lutz
Sauerteig has been elected to Chair the
Society for the Social History of
Medicine for the next 3 years.
Please click here for
further details about the
Society for the Social History of
Medicine
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