Medical Understandings of Emotions in Antiquity: Theory, Practice, Suffering. Ancient Emotions III (Trends in Classics - Supplementary Volumes, 131)

This volume focuses on the under-explored topic of emotions' implications for ancient medical theory and practice while it also raises questions about patients' sentiments. Ancient medicine along with philosophy offer unique windows to professional and scientific explanatory models of emotions. Thus the contributions included in this volume offer comparative ground that helps readers and researchers interested in ancient emotions pin down possible interfaces and differences between systematic and lay cultural understandings of emotions. Although the volume emphasizes the multifaceted links between medicine and ancient philosophical thinking especially ethics it also pays due attention to the representation of patients' feelings in the extant medical treatises and doctors' emotional reticence. The chapters that constitute this volume investigate a great range of medical writers including Hippocrates and the Hippocratics and Galen while comparative approaches to medicalwritings and philosophy especially Plato Aristotle and the Stoics dwell on the notion of wonder admiration (thauma) conceptualizations of the body and the soul and the category pathos itself. The volume also sheds light on the metaphorical uses of medicine in ancient thinking.