Post-Byzantine Medical Manuscripts: New Insights into the Greek Medical Tradition, its Intellectual and Practical Interconnections, and our Understanding of Greek Culture

Greek medical texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries known as ιατροσόφια form a significant corpus of manuscripts employed as vernacular manuals of medical instructions. In modern times, their image has been generally unfavorable and their systematic study relatively ignored. A re-examination of diverse manuscripts offers fresh insights into contemporary notions on medicine, aspects of assimilation of Hellenic, Byzantine and Western medical customs, the language of disease, the interplay between learned and magico-religious medicine, and broader cultural notions and interactions between Orthodoxy, science, and tradition. As a result, our appreciation of Greek therapeutics, and place in the wider European medical practice are all enhanced and, from the point of view of a social history of medicine, new light is shed on cultural aspects of contemporary Greek Orthodox society.