STORIES AND HISTORIES OF LIVING HEALTH

ancient world to contemporary

about chiara

Since August 2019 I have been given the wonderful opportunity to join a new research community at the University of Kiel, devoted to the study of human interaction with the environment in a broad-ranging perspective, the research cluster ROOTS. My contribution will be in the field of ancient medicine and science, with a project on ancient views about the nutritional processes in a broad cultural historical perspective, from food consumption to digestion and excretion, from dietetics to eating disorders, from metaphorical ‘resources’ to the portrayal of human anatomy, to economical aspects of eating as fundamental aspect of human relations with the outside world. The title of this project is ANCIENT GUTS.

My interest in the history and narratives of human health and illness began earlier in my research.

After finishing my undegraduate studies in Italy I moved to London to pursue a PhD in Greek literature at King’s College London. I decided I wanted to work on Euripides’ Bacchae, the last play of the youngest of the three great tragedians of the fifth century, precisely because madness, and what it means to have a sound mind is such an important topic in this play.

After obtaining my doctorate (2004) and publishing it (2007) I taught and researched a few more years in London, and kept exploring the topics of mental life and view of self, and to reflect on how ancient poets and writers choose to depict subjectivity, „mind“ and mental suffering in their work.

In 2010 I had a unique opportunity that changed my perspective in a fundamental way: I was offered a post within a research group on history of ancient medicine at the Humboldt University in Berlin („Medicine of the mind, Philosophy of the body“, directed by Ph. Van der Eijk).

I have worked on ancient medical ideas about the relationship between body and soul, bodily and mental/spiritual health and mental disorder ever since. I find the way in which ancient thinkers framed the challenges of psychopathology and the possibility of a 'psychiatry' as caring practice still extremely valuable, often sophisticated and at times more insightful than our own. Whether one shares this view or not, the terms of discussion offered by ancient thinkers remain fundamental in the way we discuss these topics nowadays. In many respects, this value still awaits exploration and recognition in current scholarship.

In addition, I have an interest in wider conceptions of life and health in the ancient world and their heritage - in particular, I have worked on animals and animal imagery, in poetry as well as medicine.

After five years based in the Humboldt University in Berlin, from 2015 to 2019 I have been a Research Fellow at Warwick University, where I held a Wellcome Trust grant in Medical Humanities. I was part of the department of Classics, joining a group of experts in ancient Greek and Arabic medicine directed by Simon Swain. My research project was on the history of an ancient disease, phrenitis, an elusive syndrome which will be part of Western medicine until as late as the 19th century.   

contact: cthumiger@roots.uni-kiel.de, chiara.thumiger@hu-berlin.de

BODY AND HORROR IN ANTIQUITY

the book (2022- )

In cooperation with George Kazantzidis, University of PAtras

A cultural history of madness (bloomsbury) with jonathan Sadowsky) 2021-

GENERAL EDITORS

Jonathan Sadowsky, Case Western Reserve University, USA

Chiara Thumiger, Kiel University, Germany

 AIMS & SCOPE

 Madness has strikingly ambiguous images in human history. All human societies seem to have a concept of madness, yet those concepts show extraordinary variance. Madness is widely seen, across time and cultures, as a medical problem, yet it often gestures towards other domains, including the religious, the moral, and the artistic. Madness impinges on the most personal and private sphere of human experience: how we understand the world, express ourselves about it, and share our mental, emotional and sensorial life with others. At the same time, madness is a public concern, often seeming to demand public response, at least by the immediate community, and often by the state. Madness is usually to some extent a disability, something that compromises functioning, yet is often also seen as a source of brilliance and inspiration. Madness is, virtually by definition, characterized by anomalous behavior, affect, and beliefs in any given context, and yet—partly because of this, and partly in spite of it—madness can be the most telling index of what a given society regards as normal or idealises as paradigm of functionality and health.

In the ancient world, for example, reference to madness was used to qualify extraordinary characters, as in the famous case of the ‘melancholic’ as gifted individual, or of mania as associated to divine or poetic inspiration; unique experiences (religious, especially initiatory, but also creative and emotional); socio-political status (e.g., guilt deemed worthy of severe punishment, pollution); illness and bodily disturbance. These elements and perspectives are not necessarily opposed or mutually exclusive. Indeed, in pre-technological society they often support and qualify one another, making the interpretation of madness profoundly different from what it would look like in modern times. And yet madness in modernity shows some parallel dualities. Attempts to cast madness as disease have had uneven success in reducing stigma, and madness remains laden with moral meanings.  Madness in modernity is at once considered a problem that compromises a person’s full flourishing, even as it retains an association with creative gifts. The mad are people whose cognitive realities defy convention. Yet, from the “influencing machine”—a delusion of being controlled by a diabolical device (described by psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk in the early twentieth century) to the “Truman Show Delusion” (the false belief that one is a widely-watched participant in a reality TV show, in the early twenty first century) the content of madness often reflects the preoccupations, social habits, and technologies of an era.

Madness is a subject of science and the arts; it is shaped by the universals of human biology and yet marked by vast cultural differences; it can afflict people of all social stations, and yet its social distribution is unequal and thus a prism through which inequalities can be viewed. The various approaches and subjects sketched below, such as politics, history of medicine, cultural history, social history, microhistory, thus need to be placed firmly in dialogue with one another. If interdisciplinarity is arguably a key ingredient in any sound historical approach, the case of madness is a prime illustration for its necessity.

 In this series, we propose a wide-ranging historical probe of these ambiguities. We plan to make the series as global in scope as available evidence, and the state of scholarship, will allow. Each individual author will have, of course, his or her own thematic, methodological and regional specialization; volume editors will, however, be encouraged to seek out contributors who have a strong command of the global and comparative literature, and who are enthusiastic about incorporating it. The ideal volume editor will also share our desire to strike a balance towards a multi-focal, and not Europe-centered perspective on madness, thus making sure the cultural geographies addressed by chapters are as varied and representative as possible.

Vol 1: A Cultural History of Madness in Antiquity                                           (c.600 BCE-600 CE)

Vol 2: A Cultural History of Madness in the Medieval Age                           (600‒1400)

Vol 3: A Cultural History of Madness in the Renaissance                              (1400‒1600)

Vol 4: A Cultural History of Madness in Early Modernity                              (1600-1789)

Vol 5: A Cultural History of Madness in the Age of Revolutions                   (1789-1900)

VoL 6: A Cultural History of Madness in the Modern Age                            (1900- the present)

A complete project description can be found here

Mental Health in Late Antique Medicine: Caelius Aurelianus on Mental Disorders

This project is a DFG sponsored project concerned with Caelius Aurelianus, a fourth/fifth century(?) medical author in the tradition of the Methodist school of medicine. His monumental nosological work, On Acute Diseases and On Chronic Diseases is, to an important extent, a Latinisation of a lost Greek treatise written by Soranus of Ephesus (first/second century). Thus far, the scholarly discourse has primarily focused on whether Caelius is simply a translator or an adapter of Soranus. However, several recent scholars (and more frequently Latinists) propose that he was an original thinker. Caelius’ late antiquity work displays his great knowledge of medical tradition up to the time of Soranus and of his keen critical mind. The bilingual and intercultural nature of the text also makes it an invaluable contribution to the study of Graeco-Roman medicine.

This project redirects the focus onto Caelius’ development of medical ideas regarding mental health. We aim to thoroughly examine Caelius’ stance on the nature of mental and bodily health by highlighting his rich accounts of the nosology, causation, and therapeutics of diseases. The aim is to bring this author—who is largely overlooked outside the small circle historians of ancient medicine—into the spotlight, by providing a detailed analysis of his work and to contribute to filling in a gap that exists in studies of ancient medicine.

This project is carried out in cooperation with the Doctoral Research Fellow Krystal Marlier, who works on Caelius’ text from the angle of history of psychiatry and historical psychology.

My part of the project, provisionally entitled ‘The physician from Sicca’, aims at gathering as much information as possible about the environment, the occupations, the socio-intellectual, political and economical context in which Caelius lived and worked, starting from the text and posing particular attention to his reference to patients’ lives and to his own professional activities.

ANCIENT GUTS (2019-)

Excellence Cluster ROOTS - Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

This project focuses on a key, but comparatively underrated aspect of ancient medicine and anatomy: the gastric area of the body, and the process of food ingestion and assimilation. Other functions and vital processes have attracted more attention in historiographies of medicine (such as the role of the brain in cognition; cardiocentric models in competition with encephalocentrism; blood circulation; the humours; respiration). Despite its well-known importance and involvement in a variety of aspects of animated life, the gastric sphere, instead, has not been centred in historiographies of medicine. Ma aim is to redress this balance, exploring the topic from the most concrete and material (the drawing of bodily anatomies; the physiology, pragmatics, and economy of human food intake) to the most abstract (psychological and cultural, even metaphorical ‘guts’).

My topic is innovative in a number of ways: first, it focuses on an aspect of the human body and its physiology seldom thematised, despite its obvious centrality; secondly, it combines the philology of ancient texts, history of medicine, and material and cultural history in a broader sense while including consideration of current neuroscientific suggestions to bring ancient theories in dialogue with modern views about the body; thirdly, it explicitly joins medical models and non-technical perceptions and metaphors of the body; finally, it aims at bringing together the history of ancient doctrines about the body and the concrete, material history of ancient life in one of its most basic aspects, the consumption of food and drink and its processes. Thus, it aims at furthering a dialogue between different areas of history, while strongly affirming the relevance of ancient texts to contemporary questions.

The lines of inquiry I propose can be subdivided, to the purpose of presentation, into anatomical, medical, environmental and cultural issues; in terms of practical inquiry, the issues are interrelated and illumine one another. 

Conventionally, world histories of knowledge are crafted as an accumulative conglomeration of multiple regional histories. Nonetheless, a Eurocentric framework, unspoken but implied, has always shaped gaze and orientation in anthropological inquiries. The research-project ‘Comparative Guts’, generously sponsored by the Cluster of Excellence Roots (Subcluster Knowledge) at the CAU University in Kiel, is precisely aimed at overcoming Eurocentrism in placing different regions, times and strata of human cultural production alongside one another in an exercise of comparison.

Looking at different modalities of knowledge acquisition, representation and communication on a global scale, ‘Comparative Guts’ places its focus on knowledge deriving from skills, from experience, from the senses.

In our project, knowledge about the anatomy of the body as it emerges from the interplay between different actors and factors (people, countries and regions) is investigated through images. In particular, we wish to explore the inner landscape of the human body with attention to a specific case study, that of the viscera, especialy those concerned with the processing and digesting of food, the ‘guts’.  

This approach will bring to the fore the issue of vision, the problems posed by imaging and reading images, and the degrees of technological mediation of knowledge across different contexts and traditions.

In practical terms, we wish to centre the images as immediate vehicle of anthropological information, while accompanying them with short texts to contextualise and explain the sources. Both elements – the choice of image, and the succinct texts – will be fundamental to allow a glimpse into different cultures while keeping the focus on this important part, or region of the body. We aim at gathering material as rich and varied as possible, from neolithic carvings and paintings, to Asian traditions (Chinese, Japanese, Indian…), to African cultures; to Meso-American, and generally pre-Colombian medicine and culture; to the challenges and objectives of contmporary imaging techniques.

PUBLICATIONS

Books

• Phrenitis. Mental Pathology and Bodily Localisation, 500 BCE-1800 CE

• A HISTORY OF MIND AND MENTAL HEALTH IN CLASSICAL GREEK MEDICAL THOUGHT. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2017)

  Review: Jessica Wright on BMCR

  Review: W.V. Harris on the TLS

  Review: Peter Jones on Classics for All

  Review: Vivian Nutton on Sehepunkte

• HIDDEN PATHS. NOTIONS OF SELF, TRAGIC CHARACTERISATION AND EURIPIDES' BACCHAE. (BICS Suppl. 99, London 2007). 

(Co-)edited Books

• ANCIENT HOLISMS. LEIDEN: Brill (2020).

• MENTAL ILLNESS IN ANCIENT MEDICINE. FROM CELSUS TO PAUL OF AEGINA (co-edited with P. SINGER). LEIDEN: Brill (2018).

• HOMO PATIENS. APPROACHES TO THE PATIENT IN THE ANCIENT WORLD (co-edited with G. PETRIDOU). Leiden: Brill (2015). 

• EROS IN ANCIENT GREECE (co-edited, with C. Carey, N. Lowe, and E. Sanders). Oxford: Oxford University Press (2013).

Articles and Chapters

• ‘Clitoridectomy and the definition of sexual intercourse’. In Kazantzidis, G., Serafim, A. (eds.) Sexual Intercourse in Ancient Greece.

• ‘Information and history of psychiatry. The case of the disease phrenitis’. In C. Meyns (ed.) Information and the History of Philosophy. Routledge.

• ‘Bodies with organs, bodies without organs’. In G. Chesi, M. Gerolemou (eds.) Technosomata.

• ‘The eyes of the lover: medical elaborations on lovesickness and ophthalmology’. In D. Kanellakis (ed.) Eros as Pathology. Forthcoming, De Gruyter.

• Chapter on ‘Animals and medicine’. In L. Totelin (ed.) The Berg/Bloomsbury Cultural History of Medicine. Volume on Antiquity. London: Bloomsbury (2021). 11,000 words.

•   ‘The body to be hidden: shame in ancient medicine’. In Kazantzidis, G., Spatharas, D. (ed.) Medical Understandings of Emotions (forthcoming).

•  ‘Introduction’. In Ancient Holisms. Contexts, Forms and Heritage. Brill (2020). Brill (2020).

• ‘Holisms, parts, wholes’. In Ancient Holisms. Contexts, Forms and Heritage. Brill (2020). Brill (2020).

•    ‘Asclepiades on phrenitis and the problem of consistency (Caelius Aurelianus, Ac.Dis. 1.1, 14-15). In L. Perilli et al. (ed.) Asclepiades of Bythinia. Technai 10 (2019) 23-43.

• (With L. Graumann) ‘Children and the Art of Medical Storytelling: Contemporary Practice and Hippocratic Case-Taking Compared’. In Cases and Anecdotes, ed. by M. Asper et al. (2020).

• 'Pandemia and Holism: What Ancient Medicine Had to Say’. In Pandemics and Crises Reloaded. Distant Times So Close, ed. by L. Käppel, C. Makarewicz and J. Müller. Sidestone (2020).

• ‘Animality, Illness and Dehumanisation: The Phenomenology of Illness In Sophocles’ Philoctetes’. In G.M. Chesi and F. Spiegel (eds.) Undoing the Human: Classical Literature and the Post-Human. Bloomsbury (2019).

• ‘Aretaeus’ Stomachikon: a parodistic vein in a nosological description’. In Kazantzidis, G. (ed.) Morbid Laughter (2019).

• ‘Ancient therapies of the word’. In White, R., Xenophontos, S., et al. (eds.) Other Psychotherapies. Special issue of the journal Transcultural Psychiatry (2020).

• ‘Liebe als Krankheit’. In N. Reggiani and F. Bertonazzi (ed.) Parlare la Medicina: fra lingue e culture, nello spazio e nel tempo. Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Parma, 5-7 Settembre (2016). Firenze: Le Monnier, 2018. Collana "STUSMA - Studi sul Mondo Antico" (2018).

• ‘A most acute, disgusting and indecent disease’: Satyriasis in ancient medicine’. In Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine. From Celsus to Caelius Aurelianus (co-edited with P. Singer). Brill, Leiden (2018).

• ‘Stomachikon, Hydrophobia and eating disorders: volition and taste in late-antique medical discussions’. In Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine. From Celsus to Caelius Aurelianus (co-edited with P. Singer). Brill, Leiden (2018).

• ‘Introduction’. In Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine. From Celsus to Paul of Aegina (co-authored with P. Singer). Brill, Leiden (2018).

• ‘The professional audiences of the Hippocratic Epidemics. Patient cases, in ancient scientific communication’. In The Greek Medical Text and its Audience: Perception, Transmission, Reception, ed. by P. Bouras-Vallianatos and S. Xenophontos. Tauris (2017).

• ‚The Hippocratic Patient‘. In P. P (ed.) Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2017).

• ‘The view of madness in the Ancient Greek and Roman tradition’. In G. Eghigian (ed.) The Routledge History of Madness (2017). London: Routledge.

• ‘The tragic prosopon and the Hippocratic facies: face and individuality in Classical Greece’. Maia. Rivista di Letterature Classiche (2016).

•  ‘Mental disability? Galen on mental health’. In C. Laes (ed.) Disabilities in Antiquity. London: Routledge (2016).

•  ‘Fear, Hope and the definition of Hippocratic Medicine’. In W.V. Harris (ed.) Popular Medicine in the Graeco-Roman World: New Approaches. (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 42). Leiden: Brill (2016).

• 'Grief and Cheerfulness in early Greek medical writings'. In Bosman, P.R. (ed.) Ancient Routes to Happiness. Acta Classica Supplement 7. Pretoria: Classical Association of South Africa (2016) 95-116.

• (with Ph. van der Eijk and Orly Lewis), ‘Gradualism and mental health in ancient medicine’. In G. Keil, and L. Keuck and R. Hauswald (eds.) Gradualist Approaches to Mental Health and Disease. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2016).

•  ‘Patient function and physician function in the Epidemics cases’. In G. Petridou and C. Thumiger (eds.) Homo Patiens. Approaches to the patient in the ancient world. Leiden: Brill (2015) 107-37.

• ‘Introduction.’ In G. Petridou and C. Thumiger (eds.) Homo Patiens. Approaches to the patient in the ancient world. Leiden: Brill (2015) 1-22.

•  ‘Animals in tragedy’. In G. Campbell (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2014) 84-98.

• ‘Metamorphosis: human into animal’. In G. Campbell (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2014) 384-413.

• ‘Mental insanity in the Hippocratic texts: a pragmatic perspective’. Mnemosyne  (2015) 210-233.

•  ‘The early Greek medical vocabulary of insanity’. IN W.V. Harris, (ED.) Mental Disorders in the Classical World. Leiden: Brill (2013) 61-95.

• ‘Vision and knowledge in Greek drama’. In D. Cairns, N. Rabinowitz, S. Blundell (eds.) Vision and Viewing in Ancient Greece. Special Issue of Helios 40 (2013), 223-46.

• Entries ‘Ancient and modern views on character and personality’, ‘Madness’, ‘Concept of Mind’, ‘Animals and animal imagery’, ‘Vision and knowledge’, ‘Bacchae’. In H. Roisman (ed.) Blackwell Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy. Oxford: Blackwell (2013) 206-12; 785-7; 849-51; 112-4; 1466-7; 353-9.

• ‘Hallucination, Drunkenness and Mirrors: Ancient Reception of Modern Drama’. In A. Bakogianni (ed.), Dialogues with the Past 1: Classical Reception Theory and Practice. BICS Supplement 126-1. London (2013) 39-60.

• ‘Mad Eros and eroticized Madness in Tragedy’. In E. Sanders, C. Thumiger et al. (eds.) Eros in Ancient Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2013) 27-40.

• ‘Introduction’. In E. Sanders, C. Thumiger et al. (eds.) Eros in Ancient Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2013) 1-8.

• ‘Metatheatre in modern and ancient fiction’. Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 63 (2009) 9-58.

• ‘Epidemia tra le Baccanti di Euripide, Tucidide e il Corpus Hippocraticum’. Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 7(2) 2009, 176-200.

• ‘anagkês zeugmat’ empeptôkamen: Greek Tragedy between Human and Animal’. Leeds International Classics Seminar (2008).

• ‘Personal Pronouns as Identity Terms in Ancient Greek: The Surviving Tragedies and Euripides’ Bacchae’. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 104 (2008).

• ‘Visione e identità nelle Baccanti di Euripide’. ACME II (2007) 3-30.

• ‘Animal World, Animal Representation, and the “Hunting-Model”: Between Literal and Figurative in Euripides’ Bacchae’. Phoenix 60.3-4 (2006) 191-210.

In preparation

• ‘The Urbs and the empire’s stomach: Ovid's Erysichthon’.

• ‘Disease as beast, disease as plant’

• TBD - in Medicine and Literature for Cambridge University Press's Critical Concepts Series, ed. by Anna Elsner and Monika Pietrzak-Franger

• TBD (Hands and Faces) in Medicine in Roman Poetry, De Gruyter, Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes. Ed by A. Hahn, S. Martorana, C Blanco

  Classics for All

DISCUSSIONS ON DISABILITY

“Disabilities is an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. An impairment is a problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a difficulty encountered by an individual in executing a task or action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced by an individual in involvement in life situations.

Disability is thus not just a health problem. It is a complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives. Overcoming the difficulties faced by people with disabilities requires interventions to remove environmental and social barriers.

People with disabilities have the same health needs as non-disabled people – for immunization, cancer screening etc. They also may experience a narrower margin of health, both because of poverty and social exclusion, and also because they may be vulnerable to secondary conditions, such as pressure sores or urinary tract infections. Evidence suggests that people with disabilities face barriers in accessing the health and rehabilitation services they need in many settings”

 (WHO, accessed 17.07.2016, http://www.who.int/topics/disabilities/en/)

The WHO definition emphasizes impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions as part of the human experience of disability, focusing thus on the body, on society's reactions to certain conditions, and on the need for interventions to remove respective barriers. This definition – the standard in our world - covers mental impairments only in a derivative way. At the centre are the physiology and structures of the human body and their variations, framed within the activities and interactions of life.

Mental disability is only a particular case within this whole, and notably one which ancient medical literature barely consider in ways on which we could superimpose our own modern constructs, (e.g.) discussions of what used to be called 'retardation' in modern or contemporary medicine – 'mental disability'. In this sense we are setting ourselves out onto an anachronistic path as we inquiry mental disability in ancient sources, and both the correspondences and the differences between us and the ancient can be only partial. 

Nonetheless, to search for the antecedent of modern ableism and dis-ableism (on these see F.A. Kumari Campbell, Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness, London, 2009) is an important critical exercise to both challenge our own prejudices and the polices and institutions of our societies, and to better understand ancient social organisations and thought systems.

For example, in the WHO definition the terms ‘impairment’, ‘activity limitation’ and ‘restriction’ indicate a permanent or long-lasting state of things that characterize an individual in his or her life and interactions with the world outside. This enduring quality of a disability, mental or physical, by which health is deeply embedded into the nature of each individual find a match with several ancient ideas: for example, that of hereditary defilement, ‘family guilt’; or the correspondence between bodily excellence and moral character (the so called kalokagathia, ‘to be good and handsome’). All these characteristics cannot be changed through therapy or good will.

On the other hand, to these impairments qualities of excellence are sometimes associated. The god Hephaistos is famously represented as lame, as well as being an extraordinarily skilled artisan:

...as well as there is a pattern of representing figures of wisdom and artistic greatness as as blind, like famously the poet Homer or the Theban seer Thyresias.

On the other hand Archilochus, the iambic poet of the 7th century BCE, went as far as clearly pointing out that an imperfect bodily appearance had nothing to do with a man’s qualities; a crooked, but strong-hearted soldier is of much more value than a brainless and cowardly macho:

‘I love not a tall general nor a straddling,

nor one proud of his hair nor one part-shaven;

for me a man should be short and bowlegged to behold,

set firm on his feet, full of heart’

οὐ φιλ<έω> μέγαν στρατηγὸν οὐδὲ διαπεπλιγμένον

οὐδὲ βοστρύχοισι γαῦρον οὐδ' ὑπεξυρημένον,

ἀλλά μοι σμικρός τις εἴη καὶ περὶ κνήμας ἰδεῖν

ῥοικός, ἀσφαλ<έω>ς βεβηκὼς ποσσί, καρδίης πλέως.

(114 West)

All these sparse, and well-known examples – many more could be mentioned – illustrate the existence of both a prejudice on ‘disabled bodies’ – whether positive or negative prejudice - and of a challenge to it from very early in Western culture.

Still, the ancient lacked a clear categorization of ‘disability’ as general experience and could be said, in some respect, to have held a less normative view of what it means to be a human being worthy of this name. This does not mean that the life of the mentally of physically impaired would have been necessarily less difficult, and sometimes tragic than it is in many places and contexts nowadays. A clear classification of able vs. dis-abled was not there, however: and it is precisely classifications, rather than the recognition of innate differences and degrees of strength among individuals per se what notably brings in rigid social divisions, margialisation and devaluation, and the ultimate call for a homogenisation of humanity based on a set of given measurable values.

Much work has been done in disability studies to reflect critically on what ‘(dis)ability’ means, and to uncover different human attitudes to this aspect of human difference in other historical periods. Still much works has to be done, especially in the area of mental disability in its various forms, notably more problematic to reconstruct than bodily particularity. Here are some studies on the ancient period:

Breitwieser, Rupert 2012. Behinderungen Und Beeintrachtigungen / Disability and Impairment in Antiquity. Oxford, Archaepress.

Francis, Sarah 2017. ‘From private disabilities to public illnesses: placing the mentally incapacitated in Roman society’, in Thumiger and Singer (eds.).Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine. From Celsus to Caelius Aurelianus. Leiden, Brill.

Garland, Robert. 2010. The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World. London, Bristol Classical Press.

Goodey, Christopher F. 2011. A History of Intelligence and ‘Intellectual Disability’: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe. Ashgate, Routledge.

Hubert, Jane 2000. Madness, disability and social exclusion: the archaeology and anthropology of ‘difference’. London, Routledge.

Kellenberger, Edgar 2011. Der Schutz der Einfältigen. Menschen mit einer geistigen behinderung in der Bibel und in weiteren Quellen. Zürich, TVZ Theologischer Verlag Zürich.

Kellenberger, Edgar 2013. Children and Adults with Intellectual Disability in Antiquity and Modernity: Toward a Biblical and Sociological Model, CrossCurrents 63.4: 449–472.

Laes, Christian 2013. ‘Approaching disabilities a Capite ad Calcem: hidden themes in Roman Antiquity’, in Laes et al. (eds.), pp. 1–15.

Laes, Christian 2014. Beperkt? Gehandicapten in het Romeinse Rijk. Leuven, Davidsfonds Uitgeverij.

Laes, Christian 2016. Disabilities in Antiquity. London, Routledge.

Laes, Christian, Goodey, Chris F. and Rose, M Lynn (eds.) 2013a. Disabilities in Roman Antiquity. Disparate Bodies a Capite ad Calcem. Amsterdam, Brill.

Rose, Martha L. 2003. The Staff of Oedipus. Transforming Disability in Ancient Greece. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

Thumiger, Chiara ‘Mental disability? Galen on mental health' In C. Laes (ed.) Disabilities in Antiquity. London: Routledge (2016).

resources

Online:

The best portal on events, publications conferences in History and Philosophy of Psychiatry-Psychology: https://historypsychiatry.com

A unique website devoted to ancient disability, physical and mental: http://www.disability-ancientworld.com

A great new blog on ancient medicine and philosophy, by Sean Coughlin http://www.ancientmedicine.org

events:

bibliography:

A list of secondary works on ancient mental life in general; ancient ideas on mental pathology; ancient medical approaches to the mind. It is broadly organised thematically. Its purpose is not to be exhaustive but to highlight what I consider to be new or fundamental contributions.

Literary representations of madness and mental life

These are studies about the representation, or the motif of madness in non medical ancient literature, including the metaphorical understanding of madness as form of artistic creativity or marker of an extraordinary personality.

Beta, Simone 1999. ‘Madness on the comic stage: Aristophanes’ Wasps and Euripides’ Heracles’, GRBS 40: 135–57.

Ciani, Maria 1983. Psicosi e Creatività nella Scienza Antica. Venice, Marsilio.

Clarke, Michael 1999. Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer. Oxford University Press.

Dawson, Abigail 2006. Madness in context in the Histories of Herodotus. Diss. Auckland.

Di Benedetto, Vincenzo 1985. ‘Intorno al linguaggio erotico di Saffo’, Hermes 113: 145–56.

Ferrari, Franco 2001. ‘Saffo: nevrosi e poesia’, SIFC 19: 3–31.

Fontaine, Miachel. ‘On being sane in an insane place — The Rosenhan experiment in the laboratory of Plautus‘ Epidamnus’, Curr. Psychol. DOI 10.1007/s12144-013-9188-z.

Fratantuono, Lee 2007. Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil's Aeneid. Lanham, Lexington Books.

Fratantuono, Lee 2011. Madness Transformed: A Reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Lanham, Lexington Books

Fratantuono, Lee 2012. Madness Triumphant: A Reading of Lucan's Pharsalia. Lanham, Lexington Books.

Giusti, Alberto 1929. ‘La pazzia religiosa di Cambise’, Bilychnis 33: 181–96.

Glenn, Justin 1979. ‘Pentheus and the psychologists. Some recent views of the Bacchae’, RCS 27: 5–10.

Guardasole, Alessia 2000. Tragedia e Medicina nell’Atene del V secolo AC. Naples.

Holmes, Brooke 2008. ‘Euripides' Heracles in the Flesh’, Classical Antiquity 28: 231–81.

Kazantzidis, Georgios 2011. Melancholy in Hellenistic and Latin Poetry. Medical readings in Menander, Apollonius Rhodius, Lucretius and Horace. Diss. Oxford.

Kazantzidis, Georgios 2017. ‘Between insanity and wisdom: perceptions of melancholia in the pseudo-Hippocratic Letters 10–17’, in Thumiger and Singer (eds.).

Lanata, Guiliana 1968. ‘Linguaggio scientifico e linguaggio poetico. Note al lessico del De Morbo Sacro’, QUCC: 22–36.

Mattes, Josef 1970. Der Wahnsinn in griechischen Mythos und in der Dichtung bis zum Drama des fünften Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg, C. Winter.

Montiglio, Silvia 2005. Wandering in ancient Greek culture. Chicago University Press.

O’Brien Moore, Ainsworth 1924. Madness in ancient literature. Weimar, R. Wagner.

Padel, Ruth 1981. ‘Madness in fifth-century Athenian tragedy’, in Heelas, Paul and Lock, Andrew (eds.), Indigenous Psychologies: the Anthropology of the Self. London, Academic Press, pp. 105–31.

Padel, Ruth 1992. In and Out of the Mind. Greek Images of the Tragic Self. Princeton University Press.

Padel, Ruth 1995. Whom Gods Destroy. Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness. Princeton University Press.

Pelliccia, Hayden 1995. Mind, Body and Speech in Homer and Pindar. Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht.

Rütten, Thomas 1992.  Demokrit, lachender Philosoph und sanguinischer Melancholiker. Leiden, Brill.

Shelton, Matthew J. 2012. Madness in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Diss. Cape Town.

Thiher, Allen 2004. Revels in Madness: insanity in medicine and literature. Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press.

Thumiger, Chiara 2007. Hidden Paths. Notions of Self, Tragic Characterization and Euripides’ Bacchae (BICS Suppl. 99).  London, University of London Institute of Classical Studies.

Thumiger, Chiara 2009. ‘Epidemia tra le Baccanti di Euripide, Tucidide e il Corpus Hippocraticum’, Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica 7.2: 176-200.

Thumiger, Chiara 2013. ‘The Early Greek Medical Vocabulary of Insanity’, in Harris (ed.), pp. 61–95.

Thumiger, Chiara 2016. ‘The tragic prosopon and the Hippocratic facies: face and individuality in Classical Greece’, Maia. Rivista di Letterature Classiche.

Toohey, Peter 1990. ‘Some ancient histories of literary melancholia’, ICS 15: 143–61.

Toohey, Peter 1992. ‘Love, lovesickness and melancholia’, ICS 17: 265–86.

Toohey, Peter 2004. Melancholy, Love, and Time: Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

Toohey, Peter 2011. Boredom: A Lively History. London and New Haven, Yale University Press.

Vaughan, Agnes C. 1919. Madness in Greek thought and custom. Baltimore, Kessinger Publishing.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre 1981. ‘Sacrificial and Alimentary Codes in Hesiod’s Myth of Prometheus.’ Trans. R.L. Gordon, in  Gordon, Richard and Detienne, Marcel (eds.), Myth, religion, and society: structuralist essay. Cambridge University Press, pp. 59–79.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre 1996. Entre mythe et politique. Paris, Seuil.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre 2006. Myth and Thought among the Greeks. transl. by J. Lloyd. New York, Zone Books. (Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs. Etudes de psychologie historique. Paris 1965).

Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 1990. Myth and tragedy. Transl. by J. Lloyd. New York, Zone Books. (Mythe et tragédie en Grėce ancienne. Paris 1986)

Walshe, Thomas M. 2016. Neurological Concepts in Ancient Greek Medicine. Oxford University Press.

Ancient ideas of mind/soul and aspects of mental life

This broad category includes various studies on ancient psychology and anthropology that are relevant to a study of the ancient mind, comprising ancient emotions, dreaming, suffering and pathology, and constructs such as intelligence and happiness; as well as philosophical and religious concepts of ‘soul’ and ‘mind’.

Böhme, Hartmut (2009). ‘Vom phobos zur Angst. Zur Begriffs- und Transformationsgeschichte der Angst’, in Harbsmeier, Michael and Möckel, Sebastian (eds.), Pathos, Affekt, Emotion. Transformationen der Antike, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, pp. 154–84.

Braund, Susanne and Gill, Christopher (eds.) 1997. The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature. Cambridge University Press.

Braund, Susanne and Most, Glenn (eds.) 2003. Ancient Anger. Perspectives from Homer ro Galen. Cambridge University Press.

Bremmer, Jan 1983. The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. Princeton University Press.

Byl, Simon 1998. ‘Sommeil et insomnie dans le Corpus Hippocratique’, Revue Belge de philologie 76: 31–6.

Byl, Simon 2002. ‘Le vocabulaire de l’intelligence dans le chapitre 35 du Livre I du traité du Régime’,  Rev. De philologie, de littérature et d’historire anciennes 76: 217–24.

Chaniotis, Angelos 2012. Unveiling emotions: Sources and Methods for the Study of Emotions in the Greek World, Volume I. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag.

Chaniotis, Angelos 2013a. Unveiling emotions: Sources and Methods for the Study of Emotions in the Greek World. Volume II. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag.

Chaniotis, Angelos and Ducrey, Pierre (eds.) 2013b. Emotions in Greece and Rome: Texts, Images, Material Culture. Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag.

Clarke, Michael 1999. Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer. Oxford University Press.

Crowley, Jason 2012. Psychology of the Athenian Hoplite: The Culture of Combat in Classical Athens. Cambridge University Press.

Crowley, Jason 2014. ‘Beyond the universal soldier: combat trauma in classical antiquity’, in Meineck, Peter and Konstan, David (eds.) Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks. The New Antiquity. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 105–30.

Davidson, James 2007. The Greeks and Greek Love. A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece. London, Random House.

Guidorizzi, Giulio 1988. Il sogno in Grecia. Bari, Laterza.

Guidorizzi, Giulio 2010. Ai confini dell’anima. I greci e la follia. Milan, Raffaello Cortina.

Guidorizzi, Giulio 2013. Il compagno dell’anima. I greci e il sogno. Milan, Raffaello Cortina.

Hankinson, Robert J. 1991. ‘Greek medical models of mind’, in Everson, Stephen (ed.),

Harris, William V. 2003. ‘The rage of women’, in Braund and Most (eds.), Ancient Anger, pp. 122–43.

Harris, William V. 2009. Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Harris, William V. 2010. ‘History, empathy, and emotion’, Antike und Abendland 56: 1–23.

Harris, William V. 2011. Restraining Rage: the Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Harris, William V. 2013a. Mental Disorders in the Classical World. Leiden, Brill.

Harris, William V. 2013b. ‘Greek and Roman hallucinations’, in Harris (ed.), pp. 285–306.

Herman, Gabriel 2011. ‘Greek Epiphanies and the Sensed Presence’, Historia 60: 127–57.

Hershkowitz, Debra 1998. The madness of epic: Reading insanity from Homer to Statius. Oxford University Press.

Horden, Peregrine 2005. ‘Travel Sickness: Medicine and Mobility in the Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Renaissance’, in Harris, William (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean, Oxford University Press, pp. 179–99.

Hüffmeier, Friedrich 1961. ‘Phronesis in den Schriften des Corpus Hippocraticum’, Hermes 89: 51–84.

Hulskamp, Maithe A.A. 2008. Sleep and Dreams in Ancient Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis. Diss. Newcastle.

Hulskamp, Maithe A.A. 2013. ‘The Value of Dream Diagnosis to the Hippocratics and Galen’, in Oberhelman, Steven (ed.), Dreams, healing and medicine in Greece: from antiquity to the present. Farnham and Burlington VT, Routledge, pp. 33–68.

Kahn, Charles H. 1985. ‘Democritus and the origins of moral psychology’, AJPh 106: 1–31.

King, Richard A.H. 2008. Common to Body and Soul. Philosophical Approaches to Explaining Living Behaviour in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Berlin, De Gruyter.

Lo Presti, Roberto 2015. “For Sleep, In Some Way, Is An Epileptic Seizure’ (Somn.Vig. 3, 457 a 9–10): Empirical Background, Theoretical Function, and Transformations of the Sleep-Epilepsy Analogy in Aristotle and in Medieval Aristotelianism”, in Holmes, Brooke, Fischer, Klaus-Dietrich (eds.), The Frontiers of Ancient Science: Essays in Honor of Heinrich von Staden, Berlin, De Gruyter, pp. 339–396.

Lo Presti, Roberto 2015. ‘Le sommeil dans les Épidémies hippocratiques’, in Leroux, Virginie, Palmieri, Nicoletta, Pigné, Christine (eds.) Approches hippocratiques du sommeil, in Approches philosophiques et médicales du sommeil de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance. Paris, Honoré Champion, pp. 209–33.

Lo Presti, Roberto 2016. ‘Perceiving the coherence of the perceiving body. Is there such a thing as a “Hippocratic” view on sense perception and cognition?’, in Dean-Jones, Lesley and Rosen, Ralph M. (eds.), Ancient concepts of the Hippocratic. Leiden, Brill, pp. 163–94.

Marzari, Francesa 2010. ‘Paradigmi di follia e lussuria virginale in Grecia antica: le Pretidi fra tradizione mitica e medica‘, I Quaderni del Ramo d'Oro on-line 3: 47–74.

Oberhelman, Steven M. 2013. Dreams, Healing, and Medicine in Greece. Ashgate Publishing.

Onians, Richard B. 1951. The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate. Cambridge University Press.

Poivre, Amandine 2009. La Faim dans la Littérature Grecque jusqu’à Aristophane. Diss. Paris.

Renberg, Gil 2003. Commanded by the Gods: an epigraphical study of dreams and visions in Greek and Roman religious life. Diss. Duke.

Renberg, Gil 2010. ‘Dream Narratives and Unnarrated Dreams’, in Scioli, Emma and Walde, Christine (eds.), Sub Imagine Somni: Nighttime Phenomena in Greco-Roman Culture. Pisa, Edizioni ETS, pp. 33–62.

Renehan, Robert 1981. ‘The meaning of ΣΩΜΑ in Homer: a study in methodology’, CSCA 12: 269–81.

Robinson. Thomas M. 2000. ‘The Defining Features of Mind-Body Dualism in the Writings of Plato’, in Wright and Potter (eds.), pp. 37–55.

Rohde, Erwin 1890–4. Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen. Tübingen, Mohr.

Sassi, Maria M. 1978. Le teorie della percezione in Democrito. Florence, La Nuova Italia.

Sassi, Maria M. 2001. The Science of Man in Ancient Greece. University of Chicago Press.

Sassi, Maria M. 2007. Tracce nella mente: teorie della memoria da Platone ai moderni. Pisa, Edizioni della Normale.

Sassi, Maria M. 2013. ‘Mental Illness, moral error, and responsability in late Plato’, in Harris (ed.), pp. 413–26.

Scioli, Emma and Walde, Christine 2010.  Sub imagine somni: Nighttime Phenomena in Greco-Roman Culture. Testi e studi di cultura classica, 46. Pisa, Edizioni ETS.

Smith, Wesley D. 1965. ‘The so-called possession in pre-Christian Greece’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 96: 403–36.

Smith, Wesley D. 1990. (ed. and transl.) Hippocrates, Pseudepigraphic Writings: Letters, Embassy, Speech from the Altar, Decree. Leiden, Brill.

Snell, Bruno 1960. The Discovery of the Mind. The Greek Origins of European Thought. Trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer. New York, Torchbooks (Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Hamburg 1946).

Sorabji, Richard 2006. Self. Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and death. Oxford University Press.

Stefanelli, Rossana 2010. La temperatura dell'anima: parole omeriche per l'interiorità. Padua, Unipress.

Strobl, Petra 2002. Die Macht des Schlafes in der griechisch-römischen Welt: eine Untersuchung der mythologischen und physiologischen Aspekte der antiken Standpunkte. Hamburg, Verlag Dr. Kovac.

Ustinova, Yulia 2009. Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind. Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth. Oxford University Press.

Ustinova, Yulia 2011. ‘Consciousness alteration practices in the West from prehistory to late antiquity’, in Cardeña, Etzel and Winkelman, Michael (eds.), Altering Consciousness: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Santa Barbara, Praeger.

Wohlers, Michael 1999. Heilige Krankheit. Epilepsie in antiker Medizin, Astrologie und Religion, Marburger Theologische Studien 57. Marburg, N.G. Elwert.

Wöhrle, Georg 1995. Hypnos der Allbezwinger: Eine Studie zum literarischen Bild des Schlafes in der griechischen Antike. Stuttgart, David Brown Book Company.

Wolfsdorf, David 2013. Pleasure in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.

Wollock, Jeffrey 1997. The noblest animate motion: speech, physiology and medicine in pre-Cartesian linguistic thought. Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Reception

Under ‘Reception’ I list studies which are heavily informed by a modern or contemporary methodology or discipline (Freudian Psychoanalysis, neurology and contemporary biomedicine more generally, twentieth-century philosophy…), or propose a reflection on these modern grids of interpretations.

Armstrong, Richard 2006. A Compulsion for Antiquity. Freud and the Ancient World. Cornell University Press. 

Bowlby, Rachel 2007. Freudian Mythologies. Oxford University Press.

Caldwell, Richard 1974. ‘Selected bibliography on psychoanalysis and classical studies’, Arethusa 7: 115–34.

Caldwell, Richard 1989. The Origin of the Gods: A Psychoanalytic Study of Greek Theogonic Myth. Oxford University Press.

Devereux, George 1970a. ‘The nature of Sappho’s seizure in fr. 31 as evidence of her inversion’, CQ NS 20: 17–31.

Devereux, George 1970b. ‘The psychotherapy scene in Euripides’ Bacchae’, JHS 90: 35–48.

Devereux, George 1976. Dreams in Greek Tragedy: an Ethno-psychoanalytical Study. Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

Evans, Katie, McGrath, John and Milns, Robert 2003. ‘Searching for schizophrenia in ancient Greek and Roman literature: a systematic review’, Acta Psychiatr. Scand.: 323–30.

Gill, Christopher 1985. ‘Ancient Psychotherapy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 46.3: 307–25.

Henrichs, Albert 1984. ‘Loss of self, suffering, violence: the modern view of Dionysus from Nietzsche to Girard’, HSCP 88: 205–40.

Matentzoglu, Silvia 2011. Zur Psychopathologie in den hippokratischen Schriften. Berlin, Winter Industries.

Nussbaum, Martha C. 1990. ‘The transfiguration of intoxication: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Dionysos’, Arion I: 75–111.

Sale, William (ed.) 1977. Existentialism in Euripides: Sickness, Tragedy and Divinity in the Medea, the Hippolytus and the Bacchae. Victoria, Aureal Publications.

Sale, William 1972. ‘The psychoanalysis of Pentheus in the Bacchae of Euripides’. YCS 22: 63–82. 

Walshe, Thomas M. 2016. Neurological Concepts in Ancient Greek Medicine. Oxford University Press.

Zajko, Vanda and O’Gorman, Ellen 2013. Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis. Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self. Oxford University Press.

Modern discussions

An absolutely not exhaustive selection of modern and contemporay discussions that I have found illuminating or useful:

Busfield, Joan 2011. Mental Illness. Oxford, Polity Press.

Frances, Allen 2009. ‘A warning sign on the road to DSM-V: beware of its unintended consequences’, Psychiatric Times 26.06.09.

Frances, Allen 2010.  ‘Good Grief’, The New York Times. 14.08.10.

Frances, Allen 2011. ‘The Uses and Misuses of Psychiatric Diagnosis’. Paper delivered at the conference ‘Situating Mental Illness’. ICI Kultur Labor Berlin, 28–29 April.

Fuchs, Thomas and Schlimme, Jann E. 2009. ‘Embodiment and psychopathology: a phenomenological perspective’, Current Opinion in Psychiatry  22: 570–75.

Gallagher, Shaun 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford University Press. 

Gilman Sander L. 2011. ‘Seeing bodies in pain: From Hippocrates to Freud’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 92: 661–74.

Guenther, Katja 2015. Localisation and its Discontents. A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Hopkins University Press.

Hornsby, Jennifer 1997. Simple Mindedness: In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind.  Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Hurley, Susan L. and Noë, Alva 2003. ‘Neural plasticity and consciousness’, Biology and Philosophy 18.1: 131–68.

Kächele, Horst 2011.‘The single case study approach as a bridge between clinicians and

Kächele, Horst, Schachter, Joseph, Thomä, Helmut 2009. From Psychoanalytic Narrative to Empirical Single Case Research. New York, Routledge.

Kendler, Kenneth S. 2005. ‘Toward a philosophical structure for psychiatry’, Am.J. Ps. 162–3: 33–40.

Kleinman, Arthur 1980. Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. An exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine and Psychiatry. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Kleinman, Arthur 1991. Rethinking Psychiatry. From Cultural category to Personal Experience. New York, Free Press.

Kutschenko, Lara K. 2011a. ‘How to Make Sense of Broadly Applied Medical Classification Systems: Introducing Epistemic Hubs’, Hist. Phil. Life Sci. 33: 583–602.

Kutschenko, Lara K. 2011b. ‘In Quest of “Good” Medical Classification Systems’, Medicine Studies 3.1: 53–70, doi: 10.1007/s12376-011-0065-5.

Matthews, Eric H. 2004. ‘Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject and psychiatry’, Int.Rev.Psych. 16.3: 190–8.

McHugh, Paul and Slavney, Ahilipp 1986. The Perspectives on Psychiatry. Baltimore, Johns

Porter, Roy 1987. A Social History of Madness. Stories of the Insane. London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson History.

Porter, Roy 1991. Faber Book of Madness. London, Weidenfeld.

Porter, Roy 2002. Madness. A brief History. Oxford University Press.

researchers’. (Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Rapaport-Klein Study Group. Austen Riggs Center. Stockbridge, MA, June 3–5 (http://www.psychomedia.it/rapaport-klein/Kaechele-2011.pdf).

Richert, Lucas 2014. ‘“Therapy Means Political Change, Not Peanut Butter”: American Radical Psychiatry, 1968–1975’, Soc. Hist. Med. 27.1: 104–21.

Rosen, George 1968. “Some Notes on Greek and Roman Attitudes to the Mentally Ill.”, in Stevenson, Lloyd and Multhauf, Robert (eds.), Medicine, Science and Culture: Historical Essays in Honor of Owsei Temkin. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 17–23.

Rosen, George 1969. Madness in Society, Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness. New York, Routledge.

Rosen, George 1970. “Mental Disorder, Social Deviance, and Culture Pattern: some methodological issues in the historical study of mental illness’, in Mora, George and Brand, Jeanne (eds.), Psychiatry and its History: methodological problems in Research. Springfield, Charles C. Thomas, pp. 172–94.

Scull, Andrew. Madness. A very short introduction. Oxford (2011).

Simon, Bennett 1978. Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece: the Classical Roots of Modern Psychiatry. London, Cornwell University Press. 

Simon, Bennett 2013. ‘Carving nature at the joints’: the dream of a perfect classification of mental illness’, in Harris (ed.), pp. 27–40.

Wakefield, Jerome C. 1992a. ‘Disorder as harmful dysfunction: a conceptual critique of DSM-III-R’s definition of mental disorder’, Psych.Rev. 99.2: 232–47.

Wakefield, Jerome C. 1992b. ‘The Concept of Mental Disorder. On the Boundary Between Biological Facts and Social Value’, American Psychologist 476.3: 373–88

Ancient mental diseases and disorders: medicine and philosophy

Historical studies on what ancient medical and philosophical authors had to say about mental life and mental health. In alphabetical order, but on top I list those which are (or will become), in my opinion, the fundamental broader perspectives for an historian of medicine.

Ahonen, Marke 2014. Mental Disorders in Ancient Philosophy. Berlin and New York, Springer.

Devinant, Julien 2016. Le troubles psychiques chez Galien. Étude d’une approche philosophique et médicale de l’âme. Diss. Univ. Paris-Sorbonne.

Dols, Michael 1992. Majnun. The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Drabkin, I.E. 1955. ‘Remarks on ancient psychopathology’, Isis 46: 223–34.

Gundert, Beate 2010. ‘Soma and psyche in Hippocratic Medicine’, in Wright, John and Potter, Paul (eds.), Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment. Oxford University Press, pp. 13–36.

Jouanna, Jacques (ed.) 1999. Hippocrates. Medicine and Culture. Transl. by M.B. DeBevoise. Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Klibansky, Raymond, Panofsky, Erwin and Saxl, Fritz 1990. Saturn und Melancholie. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp.

Petridou, Georgia and Thumiger, Chiara 2015. The patient in the ancient world. Leiden, Brill.

Pigeaud, Jackie 1981. La maladie de l'âme. Étude sur la relation de l'âme et du corps dans la tradition medico-philosophique antique. Paris, Les Belles Lettres.

Pigeaud, Jackie 1995. La Follia nell’antichità Classica. Trans. By A. D’Alessandro. Bologna, Marsilio. (Folie et cures de la folie chez les medicines de l’antiquité gréco-romaine. La manie. Paris. 1987).

Singer, Peter N. 1992. ‘Some Hippocratic Mind-Body Problems’, in Lopez Ferez, Juan (ed.), Tratados Hipocraticos, Madrid, pp. 131–43.

Thumiger, Chiara. Mental life and mental disorders in fifth- and early fourth-century medical thought. Cambridge (2017).

Van der Eijk, Philip 2013. ‘Cure and (In)curability of Mental Disorders in Ancient Medical and Philosophical Thought’, in Harris (ed.), pp. 307–38.

###

Ahonen, Marke 2013. ‘Mental disturbances. Ancient theories’, in Knuuttila, Simo and Sihvola, Juha (eds.), Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind. New York, Springer, pp. 593–603.

Ahonen, Marke 2014. Mental Disorders in Ancient Philosophy. Berlin and New York, Springer.

Ahonen, Marke 2017. ‘Madness, medical and moral: Making the distinction in ancient philosophy’, in Thumiger, Chiara and Singer, Paul (eds.), Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine. From Celsus to Caelius Aurelianus. Leiden, Brill.

Andò, Valeria 2003. ‘La follia femminile nella Grecia classica tra testi medici e poesia tragica’, Genesis 2.1: 17–46.

Byl, Simon and Szafran, Willy 1996. ‘La Phrenitis dans le Corpus Hippocratique. Étude philologique et médicale’, Vesalius 2,2: 98–105.

Ciani, Maria 1987. ‘The silences of the body. Defect and absence of voice in Hippocrates’, in Ciani, Maria (ed.), The regions of Silence. Studies on the difficulty of communicating. Amsterdam, Brill, pp. 145–60.

Clark, Patricia 1993. The Balance of the Mind. Diss. Washington.

Devinant, Julien 2016. Le troubles psychiques chez Galien. Étude d’une approche philosophique et médicale de l’âme. Diss. Univ. Paris-Sorbonne.

Devinant, Julien 2017. 'Mental disorders and psychological suffering in Galen’s cases', in

Di Benedetto, Vincenzo 1986. Il Medico e la Malattia. Torino, Giulio Einaudi.

Dols, Michael 1992. Majnun. The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Drabkin, I.E. 1955. ‘Remarks on ancient psychopathology’, Isis 46: 223–34.

Enge, Martina 1991. Psychische Erkrankungen bei Hippokrates, Celsus und Aretaios. Diss. Frankfurt.

Entralgo, Pedro L. 1970. The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity. New Haven, Yale University Press.

Falk, Friedrich 1866. ‘Studien über Irrenheilkunde der Alten’, Allg. Zeitschr. für Psychiatrie 23: 429–566.

Flashar, Hellmut 1966. Melancholie und Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike. Berlin, De Gruyter.

Föllinger, Sabine 1996. ‘Σκετλία δρῶσι: Histerie in den Hippokratischen Schriften’, in Wittern, Renate and Pellegrin, Pierre (eds.), Hippokratische medizin und Antike Philosophie. Frankfurt, Olms.

Friedreich, Johann B. 1830. Versuch einer Literärgeschichte der Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten. Von den ältesten Zeiten bis zum neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Würzburg, Strecker.

Geller, Mark 1997. ‘Freud, magic and Mesopotamia: how the magic work’, Folklore 108: 1–7.

Geller, Mark 2003. ‘Paranoia, the evil eye, and the face of evil’, in Sallaberger, Walther, Volk, Konrad and Zgoll, Annette (eds.), Literatur, Politik und Recht in Mesopotamien. Festschrift für C. Wilke. Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 1–7.

Geller, Mark 2013. ‘Philosophical Therapy as Preventive Psychological Medicine’, in Harris (ed.), pp. 339–60.

Godderis, Jan 1988. Galenos von Pergamon over psychische stoornissen. Leuven, Acco.

Gourevitch, Danielle 1983. ‘L’aphonie hippocratique’, in Lasserre, Francois and Mudry, Philippe (eds.), Forms de Pensée dans la collection hippocratique. Geneva, Droz, pp. 297–305.

Gourevitch, Danielle 1983. ‘La psychiatrie de l’antiquité gréco-romaine’, in Postel, Jacques and  Quetel, Claude (eds.), Nouvelle Historie de la Psychiatrie. Paris, Dunod, pp. 2–14.

Gourevitch, Danielle 1984. Le triangle hippocratique dans le monde gréco-romain: le malade, sa maladie et son médecin. Paris and Rome, École française de Rome.

Gourevitch, Danielle 1995. ‘“Women who suffer from a man’s disease”. The example of satyriasis and the debate on affections specific to the sexes’, in Hawley, Richard and Levick, Barbara (eds.), Women in antiquity. London, Psychology Press, pp. 149–65.

Gourevitch, Danielle 2013. ‘Two historical case histories of Acute alcoholism in the roman empire’, in Laes et al. (eds.), pp. 73–88.

Gourevitch, Danielle and Gourevitch, Michel 1982. ‘Médecins fous’, L’Evol. Psych. 47.4: 1113–18.

Gourevitch, Danielle and Gourevitch, Michel 1982. ‘Phobies’, L’Evol. Psych. 47.3: 888–93.

Gourevitch, Danielle and Gourevitch, Michel 1982. ‘Un accès mélancolique’,  L’Evol. Psych. 47.3: 623–24.

Gourevitch, Danielle and Grmek, Mirko 1987. ‘L'obésité et ses répresentations figurées dans l'Antiquité’, Archéologie et Médecine: 355–67.

Gundert, Beate 2010. ‘Soma and psyche in Hippocratic Medicine’, in Wright, John and Potter, Paul (eds.), Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment. Oxford University Press, pp. 13–36.

Hanson, Ann E.  1984. ‘Diseases of women in the Epidemics’, in Baader, Gerhard (ed.), Actes du IVe Colloque International Hippocratique. Berlin.

Hanson, Ann E.  1985. ‘The women of the Hippocratic Corpus’, Bullettin of the Institute of Ancient Medicine 13: 5–7.

Hanson, Ann E.  1986. ‘The virgin's voice and neck: Aeschylus, Agamemnon 245 and other texts’, BICS 33: 97–100.

Hanson, Ann E.  1990. “The medical writers’ woman’, in Halperin, David, Winkler, John and Zeitlin, Froma (eds.), Before Sexuality: the Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton University Press, pp. 309–37.

Hanson, Ann E.  2003. ‘”Your mother nursed you with bile”: anger in babies and small children’. In Most and Brand (eds.), pp. 185–207.

Heiberg, Johann M. 1927. 'Geisteskrankenheiten im klassischen Altertum', Allgem. Zeitschr. für Psychiatr. 86: 1–44.

Holmes, Brooke 2010. The Symptom and the Subject. The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece. Princeton University Press.

Hughes, Julian C. 2013. ‘If only the ancients had had DSM, all would have been crystal clear: reflections on diagnosis’, in Harris (ed.), pp. 41–58.

Ierodiakonou, Katerina 2014. ‘On Galen’s theory of vision’, in Adamson, Peter, Hansberger, Rotraud and Wilberding, James (eds.), Philosophical Themes in Galen (Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 114). University of London.

Jackson, Stanley W. 1969. ‘Galen — On Mental Disorders’, JHBS 5: 365–84.

Jackson, Stanley W. 1986. Melancholia and Depression: from Hippocratic Times to Modern Times. New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

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