Case Histories in Late Byzantium: Reading the Patient in John Zacharias Aktouarios’ 'On Urines', (2016), in 'Homo Patiens: Approaches to the Patient in the Ancient World', eds. G. Petridou and C. Thumiger. Leiden: Brill, 390-409 (original) (raw)
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Abstract The purpose of this paper is to introduce, edit and translate an unpublished fragment of Byzantine medical writing. Parisinus suppl. gr. 607 preserves a short and seemingly acephalous anthology of pharmaceutical remedies. A consideration of recipe collections as a distinctive but hard-to-define species of Byzantine Fachliteratur seeks to integrate this text into recent scholarship concerning a broad category of informal therapeutic writings, which testify to Byzantine drug lore, clinical practice and medicinal book culture. Investigation of the codicological structure clarifies that a secondary hand copied the fragment onto a blank folio in the mid-tenth century, contemporary with the compilation of this manuscript in a high socio-cultural and intellectual milieu in Constantinople. Examination of compositional contexts, embracing philological, textual, literary-historical and medical dimensions, suggests a ‘private’ remedy collection indicative of the use of texts in ‘household medicine’. This fragment draws particular attention as one of the earliest surviving specimens, while the codex has escaped the notice of previous inventories of Greek manuscripts with medical content.
Annals of the University of Bucharest - Philosophy Series, 2012
Medical knowledge is one of the most interesting domains of intellectual history. In Europe its development and evolution is based mostly on the Greek contribution, especially on Hippocrates’ and Galen’s works. Our intention is to get a synthetic image of medical thought during the Middle Ages and to show how Galen’s contribution was interpreted over a time span of more than 1200 years. In this article we will make some introductory remarks on Hippocrates’ and Galen’s thought and then will try to review some main aspects of the medical thought and institutions in the Byzantine Empire. We shall examine medical theories, physicians and their works, hospitals and medical instruments, as well. In a later article we hope to show some Jewish and Arab influences on the medical thought of the Western Medieval life.
Byzantine medicine and medical practitioners in the West: the case of Michael Dishypatos
Revue des Études Byzantines 54 (1996), 201-20, 1996
It seems to be generally assumed that, after about 1200, Byzantium lost its former ascendancy in the field of medical practice. The abundant evidence for Greek physicians practising in the West during the fifteenth century, however, challenges this view. Many contemporary documents speak of these émigré physicians in most complimentary terms and they often obtained the patronage of the wealthy and influential. This article concentrates on one of them, Michael Dishypatos, who was tried for sorcery at Chambéry in 1417. Although the trial document attributes to Dishypatos practices which are hardly compatible with good medical practice, it is argued that his condemnation was the result of political intrigue rather than dissatisfaction with his professional conduct. On the contrary, his very presence in the Duchy of Savoy, in the service of the Duke and of a wealthy bourgeois, Jean Lageret, is further evidence that Byzantine medicine still commanded high respect in the West in the last years before the fall of Constantinople.
This article aims to provide an English translation of two particularly popular Byzantine medical texts in verse, focusing on diagnosis by the examination of venesected blood and urine. Furthermore, these texts provide valuable therapeutic advice, especially for the use of drugs. They are composed in the form of liturgical hymns, combining mnemonic techniques. These hymns survive in various recensions and are often ascribed either to Nikephoros Blemmydes or Maximos Planoudes, both late Byzantine intellectuals and renowned teachers of advanced educational programs in Nicaea and Constantinople, respectively.
Homo Patiens - Approaches to the Patient in the Ancient World
2015
This paper provides the first analysis of case histories in the Byzantine period as they feature in the On Urines of John Zacharias Aktouarios (ca. 1275-ca. 1330). This group of clinical accounts is of special importance in that they have no counterpart in the Greekspeaking world since Galen. This study aims to illustrate various factors determining patient's response to physician's advice through close examination of John's clinical narratives. The first part deals with the terminology that John uses to indicate the patient's gender, age, social status, and clinical condition. The second part explores the significance of John's acquaintance with the patients, the patient's socioeconomic background, and also the patient's experience in connection with the physician's professional expertise. * I would like to thank Georgia Petridou, Chiara Thumiger, and the anonymous reviewer for their comments on this paper. I am also grateful to Dionysios Stathakopoulos and Ludmilla Jordanova for their insightful remarks on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 I use the term 'Byzantine medical literature' to refer to the medical works produced in the Byzantine Empire from the transfer of the capital from Rome to Byzantium in AD 330 until the Fall of the city to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. We may divide this literary output into two main phases: a) the early Byzantine phase covering the first centuries up to the Arab invasion of Alexandria in 642; and b) the subsequent centuries, including the period where the focus of scholarly activity moved to Constantinople. Cf. Temkin, O. (1962). 'Byzantine medicine: Tradition and empiricism', Dumbarton Oaks Papers 16, 97-115. 2 For a review of the very few recent publications on late Byzantine medicine, see Congourdeau, M.-H. 'La médecine à Nicée et sous les Paléologues: état de la question', in Cacouros, M. and Congourdeau, M.-H. (2006). Philosophie et sciences à Byzance de 1204 à 1453. Les textes, les doctrines et leur transmission, 185-88. See also Stathakopoulos, D. 'The location of medical practice in 13 th-century Eastern Mediterranean', in Saint-Guillain, G. and Stathakopoulos, D. (2012). Liquid & Multiple: Individuals & Identities in the thirteenth-century Aegean, 135-54, who provides a thoughtful reconstruction of medical practice in the thirteenth-century Greek-speaking world. 3 I am aware that by focusing on the construction of the patient in the case histories, I omit not only the representation of the physician, but also a further level of discussion, which would include various