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  • Medicine and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean World ed. by Demetrios Michaelides
  • Patricia A. Clark
Demetrios Michaelides, ed. Medicine and Healing in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014. xix + 354 pp. Ill. $99.00 (978-1-78297-235-8).

This book contains augmented proceedings from a conference of the same title that took place in Nicosia, Cyprus, in September 27–29, 2008. The Cyprus conference [End Page 321] was the second of a two-part International Congress organized to present the findings of a joint research initiative of the Universities of Crete and Cyprus: “Joint Educational and Research Programmes in the History and Archaeology of Medicine, Palaeopathology and Palaeoradiation.”1

The First International Symposium of the Cyprus Ancient Population Programme was also a part of this conference, and four papers from its panel are included in the volume. These focus mainly on the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, with one paper on trauma patterns in early Christian Cypriot burials. Works in progress, often hampered by small population samples, they nevertheless indicate important future directions for work in Cyprus.

In keeping with its origins, the greater emphasis throughout the collection is on material culture and human remains in the context of the history of medicine, but as the title indicates, papers range further afield and span the Bronze Age to Byzantium, and beyond—for example, Chrysostomou and Violaris on eleventh- to fifteenth-century CE Cypriot human skeletal remains and van der Eijk’s instructive historiographical analysis of W. H. S. Jones’s malarial theories. The collection is in nine parts: “Medicine and Archaeology”; “Media”; “The Aegean”; “Medical Authors/Schools of Medicine”; “Surgery”; “Medicaments and Cures”; “Skeletal Remains”; “Asklepios and Incubation”; “Byzantine, Arab, and Medieval Sources.” The forty-two papers vary in length from three pages to fifteen. Space allows me to mention only a representative selection of articles notable for original contribution and finished presentation.

Dina Bacalexi, “Le Traité de Galien De pulsibus ad tirones: Pratique Médicale et Représentation du Corps Humain,” analyzes Galen’s methods of conveying his theories of the pulse, underscoring this text’s importance for Western medicine with a table of twelfth- to sixteenth-century Latin editions.

Louise Cilliers, “The Contribution of the 4th Century North African Physician, Helvius Vindicianus,” explores the three short extant works of a physician highly regarded in his time, whose methods combined respect for the Hippocratic traditions with acute observation and an independent, commonsense approach to treatment.

Ralph Jackson, “Back to Basics: Surgeons’ Knives in the Roman World,” is a masterly examination of those scalpels remaining intact (approximately seventy). By viewing these in the context of other archaeological and textual evidence, Jackson identifies blades, often specialized, that suggest a potentially wider range of Roman surgical procedures.

Alain Touwaide, “Compound Medicines in Antiquity: A First Approach,” explores the therapeutic strategies behind the development of compound medicines, suggests that they were familiar to physicians as early as the late fifth century or early fourth century BCE, and provides an impressive appendix listing ancient physician known to have created such formulas.

Ohr Y. Margalit and Chariklia Tzaraki-Segal, “Ancient Desires to Shape Progeny: The Role of Vision and Soul in Greek and Jewish Sources of Late Antiquity,” compares writings in the Aristotelian tradition on vision and conception with two [End Page 322] different Jewish sources to find parallels but also a significant difference: unlike the Greek texts, both male and female vision play a role in shaping the human fetus in Jewish thought.

Georgia Petridou, “Asclepius the Divine Healer, Asclepius the Divine Physician: Epiphanies as Diagnostic and Therapeutic Tools,” examines literary and epigraphic divine epiphanies of the god in the context of medical diagnosis and treatment.

Demetra Papaioannou, “Ασθένειες όπως Περιγράφονται σε Βίους Ιαματικών Αγίων και Τρόποι Θεραπείας αυτών” looks at diseases and treatment methods in the lives of male and female, medical and nonmedical saints, with special emphasis on iconographic sources for Saints Cosmas and Damian.

The book is attractively produced, with numerous illustrations (many of which would have been improved by dating). Unfortunately, frequent typographical errors detract, as do one or two papers whose English would have benefited from editing. Most egregiously, Table 8.1 (p. 65) contains a technical problem: the Greek font has not materialized, making the...

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