Epilepsy in the Graeco-Roman world: Hippocratic medicine and Asklepian temple medicine compared

The rational system of medicine distinct from magical or religious practices originated with Hippocrates. This revolutionary change established diseases with natural causes and treatments. Epilepsy with its prominent physical and psychic features was regarded in ancient times with superstitious awe and given the name "Sacred Disease." Hippocratic authors distanced themselves from the prevailing supernatural views but were careful not to oppose the traditional medicine especially the cults of Asklepios. This analysis of the practices of Hippocratic and Temple medicine in relation to epilepsy reveals some clear differences and also some overlapping features.     

Herophilus of Chalcedon and the Hippocratic tradition in early Alexandrian medicine

Herophilus of Chalcedon (c. 330-250 BC) is famous as one of the leading figures in the development of medicine in Ptolemaic Alexandria around the first half of the third century BC. However, his medical science seems to have intrinsic continuity of thought with Hippocratic medicine. Herophilus followed the medical principle formulated in the Hippocratic treatise "On the Nature of Man," when he made his methodological pronouncement to the effect that primary parts of the human body should be perceptible by the senses. Herophilus rejected cardiocentrism, introduced by his teacher Praxagoras into the medical school of Cos, and returned to Hippocratic encephalocentrism, as represented by the author of the Hippocratic treatise "On the Sacred Disease." Herophilus differentiated between the faculties of the soul and the ones attributed to the nature. In his differentiation between these two faculties, Herophilus probably had in mind the Hippocratic conception of nature as specifically applied to the domain of the human body, as distinct from the soul. Herophilus' commitment to Hippocratic medicine is confirmed by his literary works on some of the Hippocratic texts. It is probable that Herophilus regarded himself as a more faithful successor than his teacher to the tradition of Hippocratic medicine. His anatomical research on the structure and function of the brain, motivated by his loyalty to the Hippocratic tradition, led him to innovative contributions to the development of medicine.     

The Hellenic and Hippocratic origins of the spinal terminology

Numerous Hellenic terms have been gradually adopted during the development of modern medical science. Moreover, there are a significant number of words that derive directly from the Hippocratic texts. Hippocrates (ca. 460-ca. 377 BC), revered as the father of medicine, and his followers left behind a valuable heritage of medical knowledge that, practically, laid the foundations of Western medicine. Their theories, collected in Corpus Hippocraticum, transformed medicine by adding, mainly, clinical observation and inductive reasoning as significant parts of medical diagnosis and treatment. Additionally, Hippocratic writings have provided an invaluable heritage of medical terms for all medical fields. The present article examines the Hellenic and Hippocratic terminology referring to the spine and how this vocabulary has influenced and dominated upon modern spinal onomatology.     

Eugenio Tanzi (1856–1934) and the beginnings of European neurology

Numerous Hellenic terms have been gradually adopted during the development of modern medical science. Moreover, there are a significant number of words that derive directly from the Hippocratic texts. Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 377 BC), revered as the father of medicine, and his followers left behind a valuable heritage of medical knowledge that, practically, laid the foundations of Western medicine. Their theories, collected in Corpus Hippocraticum, transformed medicine by adding, mainly, clinical observation and inductive reasoning as significant parts of medical diagnosis and treatment. Additionally, Hippocratic writings have provided an invaluable heritage of medical terms for all medical fields. The present article examines the Hellenic and Hippocratic terminology referring to the spine and how this vocabulary has influenced and dominated upon modern spinal onomatology.     

Approaches in Post-Experimental Science. The Case of Precision Medicine**

In the introduction to his Spalt und Fuge, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger points to the possibility that we are currently experiencing a new turning point regarding forms of experimentation, which is characterized by the growing importance of high-throughput methods and big data analytics. This essay will explore the thesis that data-intensive research indeed constitutes a form of post-experimental research by interrogating research practices in precision medicine. Section 1 will introduce this thesis and highlight salient features of precision medicine as an example of post-experimental research. Section 2 suggests approach as a category that is broader than experimental system, as discussed by Rheinberger, and can serve to analyze and compare diverse forms of research, including experimental and post-experimental practices. The essay concludes with a reflection on how categories developed for the historiography of recent science might require an update when the science or its context changes (section 3).     

Neurology in Tulp's Observationes medicae

The beginning of the seventeenth century marked the start of a scientific revolution, which had consequences for medicine. Vesalius in anatomy, and Harvey in physiology, were important figures who gave the Hippocratic and Galenic traditions new impulses. In this period of change in medical thought, Nicolaas Tulp (1593-1674) wrote his 'Observationes Medicae' (Tulp, 1641). A controversy existed in The Netherlands, concerning the circulation, with many doctors still adhering to the Galenic tradition. The following analysis discusses some of the neurologic cases from Tulp's book, seen in the light of modern medical thought.     

Next Emperor,Please! No End to Retrospective Diagnostics

Abstract

The beginning of the seventeenth century marked the start of a scientific revolution, which had consequences for medicine. Vesalius in anatomy, and Harvey in physiology, were important figures who gave the Hippocratic and Galenic traditions new impulses. In this period of change in medical thought, Nicolaas Tulp (1593–1674) wrote his ‘Observationes Medicae’ (Tulp, 1641). A controversy existed in The Netherlands, concerning the circulation, with many doctors still adhering to the Galenic tradition. The following analysis discusses some of the neurologic cases from Tulp's book, seen in the light of modern medical thought.     

The pearls and pitfalls of skull trephination as described in the Hippocratic treatise "On Head Wounds"

The purpose of our current study is to describe the guidelines regarding trephination as suggested in the Hippocratic writer's book, "Peri ton en cephali traumaton" ("On Head Wounds"). The ancient Greek text was reviewed as well as two English translations. The Hippocratic author described the indications, timing, and techniques of trephination for patients with head injury. He emphasized that attention should be paid to the details of the employed technique. He also commented on the difference of skull thickness at different anatomical sites and also between different age groups. The Hippocratic recommendations provided details for the performance of trephination by the ancient Greek physicians that are still considered important in modern neurosurgery.     

Material Culture and Indigenous Spiritism: the Katamansu Archaeological “Otutu” (Shrine)

Through the integration of oral history and ethnographic and historical data with archaeological evidence, attempts have been made to understand and reconstruct the settlement history of Katamansu, a late eighteenth-century historic town located on the Accra Plains of Ghana. Two seasons of archaeological excavations at the Koowule site of the town yielded some evidence of the 1826 Battle of Katamansu, a battle that was fought on the site between the Asante and the Ga and their coastal allies of the Gold Coast. The excavations also yielded two spectacular features, whose configuration and content appear to be the remains of a shrine of the Ga people. The features correlate well with ethnographic parallels described by Margaret Field, an anthropologist, in her research on the religion and medicine of the Ga in the 1930s. This paper presents the historical and material evidence of the 1826 battle as well as the analysis of the shrine contents. The shrine features provide insights into an archaeological shrine's mundane materiality. They also expose how local (Neolithic and historic) and European artifacts were recrafted and imbued with medicinal, magical, and spiritual properties to possibly cure and impress patients and supplicants in shrine ritual practices.     

Between the Living and the Dead: Trauma Medicine and Forensic Medicine in the Mid-Qing

This paper analyzes the influence of forensic medicine on therapeutic medicine through a case study of Qian Xiuchang and Hu Tingguang, two Chinese doctors who specialized in treating traumatic injuries. During the early nineteenth century, both men compiled medical treatises that sought to improve on a scholarly model of “rectifying bones” articulated in 1742 by the Imperially-Compiled Golden Mirror of the Medical Lineage. Both texts also incorporated information from forensic medicine, including official inquest diagrams and checklists promulgated by the Qing government. I show that they drew on these forensic materials to help address two interlinked medical issues: understanding the effects of injury on different parts of the body, and clarifying the location and form of the body’s bones. Overall, I suggest that the exchange of ideas between the realm of therapeutic medicine and forensic medicine was an important epistemological strategy that doctors and officials alike employed to improve their knowledge of the material body.     

近世日本对中国中医药的受容

近世日本未与中国建立官方关系,但两国间的文化交流并未中断。本文从日本江户幕府经由长崎贸易渠道购入中国中医药书籍、招募中国民间医师、购入中药药种和药苗三个方面考察了近世日本对中国中医药的受容,并从政治和经济层面初步分析了近世日本引进中国中医药的原因。     

Sleepwalking through History: Medicine,Arts, and Courts of Law

Somnambulism, or sleepwalking, has always been of interest to theologians, writers, philosophers, physicians, and others fascinated by unusual behaviors. This parasomnia, which was defined less precisely in the past than it is today, has long been featured in medical dissertations and books of medicine. Further, Shakespeare, Bellini, and Brown, among others, incorporated it into their plays, operas, and novels. Because some somnambulists turned violent and committed other acts detrimental to society, sleepwalking also demanded attention from legal systems, and guidelines were set for whether somnambulists could be held responsible for their actions. This historical review focuses on these developments pertaining to somnambulism through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.     

上海高级服务性公寓经营管理初探

本对酒店公寓行业特点作了较为全面的论述,并结合特定公寓酒店的管理实践,论述了高级服务性公寓经营管理特点,为如何推动酒店公寓行业的发展提供了第一手素材。     

The new Hippocratics

In this guest editorial the authors look at the association of four blood types with four Hippocratic personality types in Japan and in matching lovers through dating services in the West.     

Medicine,health and medical practice in precolonial Khoikhoi society: An anthropological‐historical perspective 1

Summary

This paper explores the role and function of medicine, and medical practices in precolonial Khoikhoi society, South Africa. It argues that medicine and medical practice was deeply imbedded in Khoikhoi society at the time of colonization, proving that a sound culture of medicine and health existed for centuries.     

Offshore Medicine

Abstract

Many renowned vegetable drugs of today would have gone into wider usage decades ago, if folklore and tradition about plants had been taken more seriously. The properties of many of these plants were known in some form or other to primitive man. The study of the direct relationship between plants and man is an interdisciplinary science; it is called ethnobotany.

Current interest in broad-based and inexpensive health care, new drugs and new or supplementary nutritious foods has prompted ethnobotanical studies in several undeveloped societies of the world. Reference is here made to various aspects of ethnobotany and to some significant research of the last 30 years. These cover not only plants employed for food and in medicine but also plants used in cordage, dyes, shelter, worship or other cultural and social aspects; these are explained and examples are provided. Primitive man understood the need for conservation of natural resources, and he exploited plants only to meet his minimum needs. The point is stressed that recording and analysis of the surviving ethnobotanical folklore is of great significance for the human race.     

Death at St Bernard's: Anti-vivisection,Medicine and the Gothic

Displaying a Gothic fascination with the misapplication of science, Edward Berdoe's St Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) was one of a number of novels in the 1880s that repackaged the horrors of vivisection for public consumption. Although the novel can be dismissed as derivative, it departed from standard themes found in other anti-vivisection texts. Through the device of a hero struggling with the moral implications of science and the reckless treatment of patients, St Bernard's challenged the legitimacy of the teaching hospital. The present article moves debate about the Gothic, literature and science beyond well-known texts by Stevenson and Wells to examine how St Bernard's combined ‘the methods of science with the methods of romance’ and shifted the anti-vivisection narrative into the hospital. In locating the novel within anti-vivisectionist uses of fiction and late-Victorian anxieties about experimental medicine and the teaching hospital, the article explores the novel's relationship with other anti-vivisection texts and Gothic fiction, and examines what it says about scientific practices and mentalities. St Bernard's fashioned a very different hospital from existing representations to warn readers of how brutish students and cruel doctors tortured patients. In doing so, the novel recast the teaching hospital as an uncanny and dangerous place.     

In their own hands: domestic medicine and ‘the cure of all kinds of tertian and quartan fevers’ in late-colonial Lima

This paper examines the ways in which the men and women of Lima sought to cure or ward off ‘tertian and quartan fevers’, by all accounts one of the city's most ubiquitous illnesses during the last decades of Spanish colonial rule. The paper's particular emphasis therein rests on practices of self-medication and household medicine: it traces how Lima's inhabitants were able to practice elementary medicine and to concoct remedies ‘for the cure of tertian and quartan fevers’ by themselves, and how they consulted various genres of popular print to circulate health advice–the yearly almanac and a range of ‘enlightened’ home medical guides–and notebooks of medical recipes to safeguard their own health in the face of that ailment. The paper argues that these practices of vernacular medical healing, and the ‘ways of knowing’ that informed and sustained them, were shared both across different sectors of colonial society and with societies across the Atlantic. The study of vernacular, domestic medical practices in the face of a quotidian, commonplace ailment thus not only provides a rare window into sickness episodes, medical learning and skilfulness, in late-colonial Lima households, it also contributes to an on-going reworking of the historiography of Spanish American science and medicine by thinking beyond, and fragmenting a ‘dichotomous view of knowledge’–of polarizations of professional versus lay, popular versus elite, Iberian versus Northern European, or, indeed, ‘indigenous’ versus ‘Western’     

Dr Thomas Beddoes The Interaction of Pneumatic and Preventive Medicine with Chemistry

Abstract

Chemistry has often been pressed into the service of medicine. In the years following Lavoisier's chemical revolution, the attention of chemists focused upon gases. Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808) developed a research programme that explored the therapeutic effects of different gases in the treatment of tuberculosis and other diseases. Beddoes was inspired by the discoveries of Joseph Priestley, employed young Humphry Davy as an assistant in his researches, received advice and encouragement from Erasmus Darwin, and used pneumatic apparatus designed by James Watt. He also engaged in efforts directed at social reform and at reforms in public health, being especially concerned with the condition of the poor. His Pneumatic Institution in Bristol was at one and the same time a research centre and a health clinic. This paper explores the interaction between chemistry and medicine in Beddoes' career, within a context of scientific and social ferment.