Histories
and Traditions of Medical Knowledge
This research group is concerned with (i)
historical justifications of medicine as
an intellectual discipline, as a science
and/or as an
art or as an otherwise theoretically
founded healing practice; (ii) with
medicine’s changing relationships to the
other sciences and to developments in
philosophy, religion and intellectual
history; (iii) with questions of
authority, orthodoxy, pluralism,
accountability and innovation within or
between medical traditions; (iv) and
with the ways in which medicine’s
self-understandings and disciplinary
demarcations are reflected and promoted
in the construction of medical
traditions and historiographical
accounts.
This sub-theme
connects a number of (ongoing and new)
projects, which have in common that they
are concerned with the intellectual
history of Western medicine in a
time-frame in which the classical
medical/philosophical traditions of
Hippocratism, Galenism and
Aristotelianism were particularly
influential. They further share a strong
emphasis on textual study: several
medical texts will be made accessible in
English translation and contextualised
for the first time.
Thus Philip van
der Eijk’s project Medicine of
the Soul, Philosophy of the Body –
Aristotle, Aristotelianism and Medical
History addresses two key questions
in the history of philosophy and
science: (i) what difference has
Aristotelian thought made to the
development of Western medicine? And
(ii) to what extent has Aristotelian
philosophy itself been shaped by its
continuing interaction with medical
thought and practice? Elizabeth Craik
is working on a project Re-mapping
the Hippocratic writings, a
comprehensive study of the Hippocratic
‘Corpus’ on the basis of intellectual
affinities, linguistic and stylistic
patterns of resemblance between the
Hippocratic writings and in relation to
contemporaneous medical/philosophical
literature. Pilar Pérez Cañizares
is preparing the first ever critical
edition, with translation, introduction
and commentary, of the
Hippocratic Treatise On Affections,
a 5th century BCE therapeutic
manual for the layman. James
Wilberding is working on Ancient
Embryology and Neoplatonist Theories of
the Living Body and is preparing the
first English translation and commentary
of the embryological work To Gaurus
(previously attributed to Galen but now
generally believed to be by the
Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry), which
is devoted to the question whether the
embryo is a living being. This links in
with Matthew Eddy’s project
The Substance
of Design: Science, Language and the
Human Body in British Natural Theology,
a study of the nature and fate of
the anatomical and physiological
evidence that William Paley used to
support Neoplatonic views of the body in
his Natural Theology (1802).
Carmen Peña
is preparing the first ever English
translation with introduction and
commentary of Avenzoar’s Book of
Facilitation on Therapeutics and Diet,
a 12th century Arabic
treatise on practical medicine that
takes on board the classical tradition
of Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen and
Dioscorides, while Thomas Rütten’s
project Hippocratism 1500-1650 is
the first systematic study of the
significance of the genre of early
modern commentaries on the Hippocratic
writings for the reception and creative
transformation of Hippocratic medicine
in this period.
Moving on to the
modern period, Holger Maehle’s
project The Tradition of Medical
Prudence in the 18th Century
is devoted to the genre of medical
advice literature for young physicians,
including Friedrich Hoffmann’s ‘Medicus
Politicus’, Samuel Gottlieb Vogel’s ‘Kranken-Examen’,
and Wilhelm Gottfried Ploucquet’s ‘Der
Arzt’, while Matthew Eddy and
David Knight’s project
The Medical
Foundations of Natural History in the 17th
and 18th century
examines the relationship between
medicine and natural history in science,
medical education and colonial discourse.
Finally, two projects
are concerned with the history of
medical historiography: Thomas Rütten’s
Histories and Traditions of Medical
Historiography studies the
comparative history of the
institutionalisation of medical history
as an academic discipline in the 19th
and 20th century in a number
of Western countries (UK, USA, Germany,
Switzerland, the Netherlands, France),
while Philip van der Eijk’s
History of the Hippocratic Canon
examines historiographical constructs of
the Hippocratic ‘Corpus’ and of
‘Hippocratic medicine’ in medical
historiography from antiquity until the
21st century.
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