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Among the ancient sources, Greek papyri of medical content recovered from the sands of Egypt represent an invaluable corpus of evidence to refine knowledge at multiple levels, from history of diseases and science to linguistics and etymology, from textual tradition to material culture. Papyri represent the oldest authentic manuscripts of ancient medicine and are a treasure-trove of lexical information, which adds time-depth to the analysis of medical terminology. Papyri not only allow us to understand the processes of illness and healing but also to familiarise with the individuals who described them through the analysis of their words. Papyri dealing with medical issues depict various linguistic scenarios, ranging from the high degree of technicality in the communication among medical practitioners to expressions used by patients and laypersons to convey medical contents according to their level of literacy. In the lexicon lies one of the most considerable contributions of Graeco-Roman medicine to modern medicine. Papyri are vivid tools for exploring the medical micro-language in the concrete and everyday dimensions of antiquity. When crossing disciplinary boundaries, in tight dialogue with the other ancient sources, papyri provide original insight into the diachronic semantic developments of medical words and the key concepts of medicine. Therefore, they contribute to enlightening the heritage and the intellectual influence of antiquity on modern medical discourse. The last part of my paper will be devoted to illustrating some specimina (such as metaphors and compounds), which have lived on in the contemporary world of healthcare, taken from the language of medicine as attested in the papyri and the other sources. We will consider both the case of termini technici having preserved a certain semantic continuity between antiquity and present, and the case in which the meaning of the modern version of an ancient term matches its ancient counterpart only partially.
Ancient medical texts, modern reading problems
Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz, 2006
The word tradition has a very specific meaning in linguistics: the passing down of a text, which may have been completed or corrected by different copyists at different times, when the concept of authorship was not the same as it is today. When reading an ancient text the word tradition must be in the reader's mind. To discuss one of the problems an ancient text poses to its modern readers, this work deals with one of the first printed medical texts in Portuguese, the Regimento proueytoso contra ha pestenença, and draws a parallel between it and two related texts, A moche profitable treatise against the pestilence, and the Recopilaçam das cousas que conuem guardar se no modo de preseruar à Cidade de Lixboa E os sãos, & curar os que esteuerem enfermos de Peste. The problems which arise out of the textual structure of those books show how difficult is to establish a tradition of another type, the medical tradition. The linguistic study of the innumerable medieval plague treatises may throw light on the continuities and on the disruptions of the so-called hippocratic-galenical medical tradition.
Medical vocabulary in the Latin version of the books of Kingdoms and Paralipomenon
In the biblical text, the medical vocabulary remains one of the least researched aspects, even though it is quite widely represented in the text. The present study analyzes medical vocabulary in the historical books of the Vulgate, the Latin Bible, one of its most ancient translations. During the research process, the etymology, stylistics, and semantics of some medical lexemes were considered and the peculiarities of their usage were traced. The paper can be used for further research in the fields of medical history, Latin studies, and biblical studies. Keywords: Vulgate, biblical studies, medical vocabulary, lexical-semantical field, semantics, etymology, stylistics. Published: Dorosh M. Medical Vocabulary in the Latin Version of Kingdoms and Paralipomenon / Marko Dorosh // Сучасні тенденції розвитку освіти й науки : проблеми та перспективи: зб. наук. праць / [упорядник Ю.І. Колісник-Гуменюк] / Marko Dorosh. – Київ–Львів–Бережани–Гомель, 2019. – С. 215–221.
Ancient doctors' literacies and the digital edition of papyri of medical content
Classics@, 2019
Roman world. This term-"medical literacy"-is used to encompass a wide range of personalities, comprising both specialized physicians and learned laymen with specific interests in medicine and related topics, and points to the ability of reading, understanding and producing a written text dealing with medical subjects. In this contribution, I wish to develop her overview, showing that ancient medical writings on papyrus are in fact characterized by multiple 'literacies' that can be better understood through the categories of transtextuality and better represented (and studied) in their complexity with the digital infrastructure of multitext. First of all, we can highlight at least three categories of' 'authors' of medicine-related texts, that is possessing a certain degree of 'medical literacy': (a) academically trained physicians, endowed with wide cultural horizons and authors of the main reference works in medical literature (Galen above all, then e.g. the leaders of the ancient medical schools, authors of treatises on their own); (b) practicing physicians, educated both from the formers' treatises (and the derived handbooks) and from their own experience. They do not author literary works but nonetheless often prove very skilful and well-trained, such as the two doctors of P.Mert. I 12 (AD 58, August 29th), who maintain a written correspondence discussing pharmacological issues,[1] and the Egyptian iatroklystes of P.Lond. I 43 = UPZ I 148 (II century BC), who "employed in his practice a Greek interpreter, a man familiar with the Egyptian script, presumably to communicate with indigenous assistants and Greek-speaking patients alike"[2] (c) learned laymen, not scholarly trained but possessing some degree of medical knowledge, such as the Psenpaapis of O.Claud. II 220 (ca. AD 137-145), who asks his brother Gemellus to go to the doctor to get some saffron and to send it to him, because he did not receive the medicinal kollyria.[3] It seems apparent that Psenpaapis-clearly an Egyptian character-is willing to reproduce the eye-salve by himself.[4] This overall scenery of medical literacy can be further declined from the broader sociological point of view, where the (plural) concept of 'literacies' has been recently developed to refer to "text-oriented events embedded in particular sociocultural contexts,"[5] stressing for example the use of reading/writing abilities, as well as communication strategies. This fits particularly well the situation of 'medical literacy', since the relevant papyrological sources-of the most diverse typologies and formats, spreading from literary treatises to practical handbooks, from didactic manuals to collections of recipes, from official reports to private letters mentioning medical topics, chronologically ranging from the III century BC to the VII AD[6]-show a complex degree of textuality that can be described through the concept of transtextuality as investigated by