Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception Studies in Ancient Medicine Managing Editor Philip J. van der Eijk (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Editors Ann Ellis Hanson (Yale University) Brooke Holmes (Princeton University) Orly Lewis (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) John Scarborough (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Joseph Ziegler (University of Haifa) Volume 53 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sam Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception Edited by Chiara Thumiger LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Image by Christoph Geiger. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thumiger, Chiara, editor. Title: Holism in ancient medicine and its reception / edited by Chiara  Thumiger. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Studies in ancient  medicine, 09251421 ; 53 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020040624 (print) | LCCN 2020040625 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004443082 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004443143 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Holistic medicine. | Medicine—History. Classification: LCC R733 .H64 2021 (print) | LCC R733 (ebook) |  DDC 610—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040624 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040625 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0925-1421 isbn 978-90-04-44308-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-44314-3 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Chiara Thumiger, except where stated otherwise. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations viii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Chiara Thumiger Part 1 Holism: Methodological and Theoretical Perspectives 1 Holism, Parts, Wholes 25 Chiara Thumiger 2 Holism, Sympathy, and the Living Being in Ancient Greek Medicine and Philosophy 47 Brooke Holmes 3 ‘Holism’ in Cognitive Approaches to the Ancient Emotions 84 William Michael Short Part 2 Is Graeco-Roman Medicine Holistic? 4 Hippocratic Holisms 113 Hynek Bartoš 5 Holism and the Methodists 133 David Leith 6 Is Graeco-Roman Medicine Holistic? Galen and Ancient Medical-Philosophical Debates 154 P. N. Singer 7 Holism of Body and Mind in Hippocratic Medicine and Greek Tragedy 184 Elizabeth Craik vi Contents 8 Plato’s Charmides on Philosophy as Holistic Medical Practice 201 Giouli Korobili and Konstantinos Stefou 9 A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology 220 Laurence M. V. Totelin 10 Cohesive Causes in Ancient Greek Philosophy and Medicine 237 Sean Coughlin 11 Pneuma as a Holistic Concept in Galen 268 Julius Rocca Part 3 Medical Holism beyond the Graeco-Roman World 12 Humoralism in Āyurvedic Medicine 295 Francis Zimmermann 13 A Systemic Etiology of Sicknesses from Ancient Iraq: Organ Systems and the Functional Holism of the Babylonian Body 318 John Z. Wee 14 Epidemic Disease in a Humoral Environment: From Airs, Waters and Places to the Renaissance 357 Vivian Nutton 15 Mind-Body Interaction: The Influence of Ancient Ideas in Twelfth-Century England 377 Claire Trenery 16 ‘Treating the Patient, Not Just the Disease’: Reading Ancient Medicine in Modern Holistic Medicine 400 Helen King Index Rerum 425 Index Locorum 437 Index Verborum (selected) 446 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Wellcome Trust for sponsoring the conference where this volume originated, along with the Institute of Classical Studies in London, which hosted the event in September 2017, and Greg Woolf for his support as Director. Above all else, I am grateful once again to the Wellcome Trust for generously funding my fellowships in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick at the time when this project began, as well as during the preparation of this volume. I would also like to thank the Excellence Cluster ROOTS at Kiel University, with which I have been affiliated during the final phases of preparation of the manuscript, for its generous help and backing. I am grateful to all the participants in the original conference for both their written contributions and their constructive discussion there. Simon Swain was very helpful and positive about this project from the start, and offered precious advice before and during the preparation of the volume. The authors and I also benefitted immensely from the comments and con- structive criticism offered by numerous readers and peer-reviewers, which have made a great difference in matters large and small. Among them, it is a particular pleasure to mention the anonymous reader at Brill who offered insightful advice, and Philip van der Eijk for his constant interest in the project and support. S. Douglas Olson’s editorial expertise was vital in converting the various individual manuscripts into their final published form. Finally, Giulia Moriconi, Dinah Rapliza and the rest of the team at the press deserve warm thanks for their assistance throughout. Chiara Thumiger Abbreviations CMG Corpus Medicorum Graecorum CML Corpus Medicorum Latinorum Leipzig and Berlin, Teubner, Akademie-Verlag and de Gruyter; texts available online at: http://cmg.bbaw.de/epubl/online/editionen.html AHw W. von Soden (ed.). Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz (1965, 1972, and 1974) AMT R. Campbell Thompson (ed.) Assyrian Medical Texts from the Originals in the British Museum. London: Milford (1923). BAM Prefix to cuneiform hand copies numbered consecutively across vols. 1–6 of F. Köcher, Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen. Berlin: De Gruyter (1963–1980) CAD The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (1956–2011) CT Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets, &c. in the British Museum. London: British Museum (1896–) IG I3 Inscriptiones Graecae I: Inscriptiones Atticae Euclidis anno anteriores. Ed. D. Lewis and J. Jeffery. 3rd edn. Berlin. De Gruyter (1981, 1994) I.Métr. Metrical Inscriptions of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Ed. E. Bernand, Inscriptions métriques de l’Egypte gréco-romaine. Paris (1969). K. K. G. Kühn (ed.) Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, 22 vols., Leipzig (1821–33) L. É. Littré (ed.) Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrate. Paris: J. B. Baillière (1839–61) LBAT T. G. Pinches and J. N. Strassmaier, Late Babylonian Astronomical and Related Texts. Providence: Brown University Press (1955) STT Prefix to cuneiform hand copies numbered consecutively across O. R. Gurney and J. J. Finkelstein, The Sultantepe Tablets, vol. 1. London: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd. (1957) and O. R. Gurney and P. Hulin, The Sultantepe Tablets, vol. 2. London: Percy Lund, Humphries and Co. Ltd. (1964) Notes on Contributors Hynek Bartoš is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the Charles University in Prague. He is the author of Philosophy and Dietetics in the Hippocratic On Regimen (Brill 2015) and a range of essays on the history of ancient Greek phi- losophy and medicine. Most recently, he co-edited (with C. G. King) the vol- ume Heat, Pneuma, and Soul in Ancient Philosophy and Science (CUP 2020). Sean Coughlin is Research Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 980 Episteme in Bewegung funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Institute for Classical Philology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He was previously a Research Fellow at Excellence Cluster Topoi and a Visiting Research Fellow at Einstein Centre Chronoi (Berlin), the Research Training Group “Philosophy, Science and the Sciences” (Berlin), and the Martin Buber Society of Fellows (Jerusalem). He is co-editor with David Leith and Orly Lewis of The Concept of Pneuma after Aristotle (Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2020) and he publishes on topics in Ancient Greek philosophy, science, and medicine. Elizabeth Craik formerly professor at Kyoto University, is now honorary professor in the School of Classics, University of St Andrews. She has in recent years published editions, with commentaries, of several Hippocratic texts (Places in Man, On Sight, On Anatomy, On Glands) and a complete scholarly guide to the Hippocratic Corpus (The Hippocratic Corpus: Content and Context), as well a range of articles. Brooke Holmes is Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (2010) and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy (2012), in addi- tion to being the co-editor of five volumes, most recently Antiquities beyond Humanism (2019) and the exhibition project Liquid Antiquity (2017). From 2012 to 2020 she directed the programme Postclassicisms and co-authored Postclassicisms (2020). She is finishing a book entitled The Tissue of the World: Life, Nature, and Sympathy. x Notes on Contributors Helen King is a historian of medicine and the body. She retired from The Open University in 2017. Since then she has held a one-year post at Gustavus Adolphus College, MN, to promote interdisciplinary approaches to history. Her earlier career in- cluded visiting roles at the Peninsula Medical School and the universities of Vienna, Texas, Notre Dame and British Columbia. She has published on as- pects of medicine from classical Greece to the nineteenth century and her most recent book, Hippocrates Now, was published in 2019. She is currently working on a history of the female body for Profile Books. Giouli Korobili is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Utrecht. She studied Classical Philology and Philosophy at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (BA), at the University of Ioannina (MA) and at Humboldt University of Berlin (Ph.D.). She has contributed to a number of collective volumes on Aristotle, ancient medicine and Byzantine Aristotelian commentators. She is currently revising her Ph.D. thesis on Aristotle’s On Youth and Old Age, on Life and Death, on Respiration for publication. David Leith is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on Graeco-Roman medicine, and especially its interactions with philosophy. He has published on the Hellenistic and Roman medical sects and their theo- ries, especially Herophilus, Erasistratus, Asclepiades and the Methodists, and has edited fragments of medical papyri for The Oxyrhynchus Papyri series. He is currently preparing an edition, with essays and commentary, of the testimonia on Asclepiades of Bithynia. Vivian Nutton is emeritus professor of the history of medicine at UCL. He has written exten- sively on many aspects of the history of medicine from the Ancient Greeks to the seventeenth century. His recent books include Ancient Medicine, 2nd edi- tion, 2013; Johann Guinther and Andreas Vesalius, Principles of Anatomy ac- cording to Galen, 2017; An Autobibliography by John Caius, 2018; and Galen, a thinking Doctor in Imperial Rome, 2020. His current project is a history of med- icine in the sixteenth century. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Ancient Society of College Youths.