Freie Universität Berlin

CONFERENCE – LONDON, INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES 11-12.09.17

Contact: Chiara Thumiger c.thumiger@warwick.ac.uk

Confirmed speakers: Vivian Nutton, Helen King, Claire Trenery, Julius Rocca, Michael Boylan, Christian Laes, Laurence Totelin, David Leith, Hynek Bartos, Brooke Holmes, Peter Singer, Sean Coughlin, Orly Lewis, Georgios Kazantzidis, Chiara Thumiger

The conference programme is available here

ANCIENT ‘HOLISM’ in Graeco-Roman medicine and its cultural context.

Localisation has always been one of the key modalities, if not the central modality by which we read ancient accounts of human fundamental bodily experiences such as pathology, emotions and mental alteration. The firm identification of a locus affectus, an organ (or a set of organs) involved, or a suffering area of the body is indeed very visible in medical discussions of diseases and disorders, whether strictly physiological or also mental, as well as poetic representations of biological or mental experiences. The alternative modality, that of de-localisation and more generally of an attention to human experiences of the body as diffuse, dynamic and explicitly disjointed from a firm location has received instead much less attention. The conference invites dedicated discussion to key questions, bringing together scholars of ancient science and philosophy and experts in Graeco-Roman literature and culture to explore the ancient sources against powerful and influential contemporary constructs such as holism, psycho-somatic unity, and systemic approaches to human health, in order to highlight a less scrutinised feature of ancient readings of the body, as well as a strand of modern and contemporary reception of ancient medical ideas.