Medical Understandings of Emotions in Antiquity: Theory, Practice, Suffering. Ancient Emotions III (Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes, 131)

This volume focuses on the under-explored topic of emotions' implications for ancient medical theory and practice, while it also raises questions about patients' sentiments. Ancient medicine, along with philosophy, offer unique windows to professional and scientific explanatory models of emotions. Thus, the contributions included in this volume offer comparative ground that helps readers and researchers interested in ancient emotions pin down possible interfaces and differences between systematic and lay cultural understandings of emotions. Although the volume emphasizes the multifaceted links between medicine and ancient philosophical thinking, especially ethics, it also pays due attention to the representation of patients' feelings in the extant medical treatises and doctors' emotional reticence. The chapters that constitute this volume investigate a great range of medical writers including Hippocrates and the Hippocratics, and Galen, while comparative approaches to medical writings and philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, dwell on the notion of wonder/admiration (__thauma__), conceptualizations of the body and the soul, and the category pathos itself. The volume also sheds light on the metaphorical uses of medicine in ancient thinking. Preface 7 Contents 9 Introduction 11 Part I: Emotions Across Medicine and Philosophy 27 What is a Pathos? Where Medicine Meets Philosophy 27 Drugs and Psychotropic Words in Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen 53 Wonder and Perplexity across Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Greece 69 Part II: Emotions in the Medical Room 127 The Doctor’s Dilemma: Addressing Irrational Fears 127 Shame and Concealment in the Hippocratic Corpus 133 The Body to be Hidden: Shame and Ancient Medicine 155 Reading and Misreading Medical Emotions: Some Cases of Female Patients in the Hippocratic Epidemics 183 Part III: Medico-philosophical Treatments of Emotion 211 Posidonius and the Pneumatists: The Aetiology of Emotions and Diseases 211 Galen on Non-Rational Motivation and the Freedom from Emotions: A Reading of Affections of the Soul 239 Disorders of the Soul: Emotions and Clinical Conditions in Galen 257 The Atlas Patient: Galen on Melancholia and Psychosis 281 List of Contributors 297 Index Rerum et Nominum 299 Index Auctorum Antiquorum et Locorum 305