Greek Medical Literature and its Readers

This volume focuses on the relationship between Greek medical texts and their audience(s), offering insights into how not only the backgrounds and skills of medical authors but also the contemporary environment affected issues of readership, methodology and mode of exposition. One of the volume's overarching aims is to add to our understanding of the role of the reader in the contextualisation of Greek medical literature in the light of interesting case-studies from various - often radically different - periods and cultures, including the Classical (such as the Hippocratic corpus) and Roman Imperial period (for instance Galen), and the Islamic and Byzantine world. Promoting, as it does, more in-depth research into the intricacies of Greek medical writings and their diverse revival and transformation from the fifth century BC down to the fourteenth century AD, this volume will be of interest to classicists, medical historians and anyone concerned with the reception of the Greek medical tradition. Chapters 3, 6, and 9 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos is Wellcome Lecturer in History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, UK Sophia Xenophontos is Lecturer in Classics at the University of Glasgow, UK

Introduction, Petros Bouras-Vallianatos and Sophia Xenophontos PART I The Classical World 1. Alcmaeon and His Addressees: Revisiting the Incipit, Stavros Kouloumentas 2. Gone with the Wind: Laughter and the Audience of the Hippocratic Treatises, Laurence Totelin 3. The Professional Audiences of the Hippocratic Epidemics: Patient Cases in Hippocratic Scientific Communication, Chiara Thumiger PART II The Imperial World 4. Galen's Exhortation to the Study of Medicine: An Educational Work for Prospective Medical Students, Sophia Xenophontos 5. An Interpretation of the Preface to Medical Puzzles and Natural Problems 1 by Ps.-Alexander of Aphrodisias in Light of Medical Education, Michiel Meeusen PART III The Islamic World 6. The User-Friendly Galen: -unayn Ibn Is-aq and the Adaptation of Greek Medicine for a New Audience, Uwe Vagelpohl 7. Medical Knowledge as Proof of the Creator's Wisdom and the Arabic Reception of Galen's On the Usefulness of the Parts, Elvira Wakelnig PART IV The Byzantine World 8. Physician versus Physician: Comparing the Audience of On the Constitution of Man by Meletios and Epitome on the Nature of Men by Leo the Physician, Erika Gielen 9. Reading Galen in Byzantium: The Fate of Therapeutics to Glaucon, Petros Bouras-Vallianatos