Helen King

Health in antiquity

How healthy were people in ancient Greece and Rome, and how did they think about maintaining and restoring their health? For students of classics, history or the history of medicine, answers to these and many previously untouched questions are dealt with by renowned ancient historians, classical scholars and archaeologists. Using a multidisciplined approach, the contributors assess the issues surrounding health in the Greco-Roman world from prehistory to Christian late antiquity. Sources range from palaeodemography to patristic and from archaeology to architecture and using these, this book considers what health meant, how it was thought to be achieved, and addresses how the ancient world can be perceived as an ideal in subsequent periods of history.

The importance of landscape characteristics for the delivery of cultural ecosystem services

The importance of Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) to human wellbeing is widely recognised. However, quantifying these non-material benefits is challenging and consequently they are often not assessed. Mapping approaches are increasingly being used to understand the spatial distribution of different CES and how this relates to landscape characteristics. This study uses an online Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) to elicit information on outdoor locations important to respondents in Wiltshire, a dynamic lowland landscape in southern England. We analysed these locations in a GIS with spatial datasets representing potential influential factors, including protected areas, land use, landform, and accessibility. We assess these characteristics at different spatial and visual scales for different types of cultural engagement. We find that areas that are accessible, near to urban centres, with larger views, and a high diversity of protected habitats, are important for the delivery of CES. Other characteristics including a larger area of woodland and the presence of sites of historic interest in the surrounding landscape were also influential. These findings have implications for land-use planning and the management of ecosystems, by demonstrating the benefits of high quality ecological sites near to towns. The importance of maintaining and restoring landscape features, such as woodlands, to enhance the delivery of CES were also highlighted.

Producing Woman: Hippocratic Gynaecology

The collection of medical writings associated with the name of Hippocrates has until recently been somewhat neglected as a source for women in the ancient world. In the past, scholars have vigorously debated which, if any, texts in the collection were written by Hippocrates (traditionally C.460–C.370 BC) himself and, consequently, which texts should be assigned to the ‘school of Cnidos’ and which to the ‘school of Cos’ with which the ‘father of medicine’ was associated. Current scholarship has moved away from these topics, accepting that there are wide variations in style and content between the medical texts which were first written down between the fifth and first centuries BC, then circulated widely in various compilations and summaries before being assembled under the name of Hippocrates at some unknown date; perhaps as late as the tenth century AD.1

On the misuses of medical history

A surprising amount of bad history passes peer review in the sciences and medicine. What do we mean by bad history? One example would be the misuse of historical images. Many images of so-called plague used in scientific publications depict patients suffering from leprosy.1 Another example is when commonly repeated claims about historical people or events are lifted from earlier scientific or medical writings, without checking whether professional historical scholarship has revised earlier interpretations.

Fear of flute girls, fear of falling

Within the texts of the Hippocratic corpus, we read of two men who sought treatment for what we would now call phobias; Nicanor who suffered from fear of flute girls and Democles who suffered from fear of falling. As fear is not always bad, perhaps these men would not have been treated, merely talked with, about the effects of the fear on their bodies. The most common retrodiagnosis offered for them in the period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century was ‘melancholy’ and then, from the nineteenth century until the present, ‘phobia’. This chapter examines how the texts have been used within these two diagnostic categories. In exploring these two cases in Epidemics, there is also further evidence for the image of Hippocrates promoted by the history of western medicine. The aulos had the power to take over those who heard it due to its ‘enticing’ sound. Keywords: aulos ; Democles; fear of falling; flute girls; Hippocratic corpus; melancholy; Nicanor; phobia

Fighting Through Fiction

As the Call for Papers for this Special Issue observed, and as medicine and the medical humanities have increasingly acknowledged, we are narrative creatures. In 1999, in a ‘Discussion point’ feature in the journal Social History of Medicine, David Harley (1999, p. 407) set out the case for a ‘rhetorical turn’ in the history of medicine, recognising that ‘diagnosis, therapy and prognosis... are usually interactive processes and the efficacy of medical interventions therefore depends upon meaning, narrative and persuasion’. The rhetoric of healing creates confidence in the patient, and the expectation of a cure. In the following year, first Paolo Palladino (2000) and then Ivan Crozier responded to Harley, Palladino negatively, Crozier (2000, p. 542) more positively, but concluding that the social construction of medicine goes beyond rhetoric: ‘Rhetoric is fundamental, but it is not the end of the story’. Since that debate, the history of medicine has to some extent given way to the broader ‘medical humanities’, and ‘rhetoric’—with its implications of knowledge claims as contested social constructs—has been replaced by a more general interest in an apparently more neutral ‘narrative’. Narrative is simply how human brains like to think, arranging apparently random and thus disturbingly meaningless events into patterns which reveal a purpose or move towards a resolution, and which create the central character as winner, loser, or survivor, as hero or as villain. John Green’s (2012) novel about young cancer patients, The Fault in Our Stars, opens with an ‘Author’s note’ on the power, and indeed the necessity, of narrative:

Hodges, Nathaniel (1629–1688)

Hodges, Nathaniel (1629–1688), physician, was born on 14 September 1629 in Kensington, the son of Thomas Hodges, dean of Hereford. He was a kings scholar at Westminster School, and in 1646 was awarded a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He transferred to Oxford in 1648, and was appointed by the parliamentary visitors to a studentship at Christ Church (BA 1651, MA 1654, MD 1659). In 1654 Hodges contributed to the Oxford volume of verse issued to celebrate the peace with the Dutch. He practised medicine from his house in Walbrook, London, where he was admitted as a candidate for fellowship of the College of Physicians in 1659; he was not admitted to fellowship until 1672, an unusually long delay.

Cellier, Elizabeth (fl. 1668–1688)

Cellier, Elizabeth (fl. 1668–1688), midwife, has been linked to the Dormer family of Buckinghamshire, while her enemies claimed that she was a braziers daughter from Canterbury. Cellier said that she converted to Catholicism out of loyalty to the crown, after her father and brother died on the same day during the civil war. Nothing is known of her training as a midwife, although from her writings it appears that she owned Jacques Guillemeaus Child-Birth, or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (1612). Nor is it known whether Cellier was licensed; if, as is usually assumed, she served the Catholic nobility in London, a licence may have been irrelevant. The role of midwife enabled her to move freely about London by day or night, and it is known that Lady Powis used Cellier to carry messages. Although Cellier claimed that her advice had led to Mary of Modenas successful pregnancy in 1687–8, she was not present at the birth of the prince of Wales.

Chamberlen, Hugh, the elder (b. 1630x34, d. after 1720)

(b. 1630x34, d. after 1720), physician and economist, the eldest son of Peter Chamberlen (1601–1683), and his wife, Jane, eldest daughter of Sir Hugh Myddelton, was born in the parish of St Anne, Blackfriars, London, between 1630 and 1634. Peter Chamberlen the younger (1572–1626) was his grandfather and Paul Chamberlen (1635–1717) his brother [see under Chamberlen family (per. c.1600–c.1730)]. Nothing is known of his education; he held the bishops licence to practise midwifery, but probably did not have a degree in medicine. He nevertheless appears as doctor of medicine in the state papers and on the lists of the Royal Society, to which he was elected a fellow on 6 April 1681. On 28 May 1663 he married Dorothy Brett, daughter of Colonel John Brett, at St Pauls, Covent Garden. They had three sons—Hugh Chamberlen the younger (1664–1728) [see under Chamberlen family (per. c.1600–c.1730)], Peter, and Myddelton—and one daughter, Dorothy.

Reading the Female Body

Cadden, Joan The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Natural Philosophy, and Culture Dean-Jones, Lesley Ann Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science Demand, Nancy Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece