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The Healing Classics

Medical Humanities and the Graeco-Roman Tradition

Online workshop: 9-10 September, 2021

International conference: 8-9 (?) September 2022

https://thehealingclassics.blogspot.com/

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Behind the Scenes

Organisers

Dr. Michiel Meeusen (Classics)
Prof. Michael Trapp (Classics)
Prof. Brian Hurwitz (Centre for the Humanities and Health)

With the generous support of

Gerda Henkel Stiftung
Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies

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Concept & Aim

“A properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities.”

Corinne Saunders, “Voices and Visions: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Writing”, in J. Richards, S. Atkinson, J. Macnaughton, A. Woods & A. Whitehead (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Edinburgh, 2016: 411-427, at 411.

Potential relevance of ‘the Classics’ / experience of Graeco-Roman antiquity for the critical medical humanities and their mission to ‘humanise’ today’s medical and healthcare practice, education and research?
Put past and present into conversation, to discover continuities and contrasts with contemporary perspectives:

Re issues such as the ideology of health, narratives of illness, the confrontation with mortality, the importance of professional ethics

Questions:

What does it mean to be a (healthy) human being?
What is the value of ‘making sense’ of illness, trauma and loss?
What are the role, value and requirements of human qualities in the context of healthcare?
What useful strategies do ancient sources propose for living well with chronic pain and illness?
Classical themes and motifs in/for creative and expressive arts therapy?

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Methodological problems (for concluding discussion)

PROBLEM1: Can we speak of a ‘shared’ medical humanity between the ancients and us?

🡪 What are the potential risks / rewards of hypothesizing such a ‘transhistorical’ trait-d’union?

REWARDS: What gains are there to be had from this ‘alien but charming’ confrontation with Greek and Roman sources?

= : What do we learn from the ancients? What concepts, advice, best practices are still relevant (‘historical evergreens’)?

E.g., Medical techne, as ‘art’/‘craft’ not just as ‘science’; all-round training of ancient doctors + open attitude towards the ‘soft’ humanities (cf. Galen’s doctor-philosophers); how do the ancients deal with medical uncertainty, ambiguity, subjective experience (vs. positivistic objectivity)? …

≠ : Is the ‘otherness’ of the ancients in itself relevant, informative, usefully contrastive?

E.g., what is the use of reading/interpreting ‘strange’ ancient patient voices? Can classical hermeneutics help in training aspiring clinicians to read their own ‘strange’ patients better?

🡪 Similarities between historical methodology and clinical methods and decision making?

Is the idea that medical/scientific knowledge/practice is culturally determined in itself useful?

🡪 Stimulate awareness of other medical practices and paradigms

RISKS: What risks and how to mitigate them?

What epistemic/cognitive pitfalls should we avoid, or at least be aware of, as the ancients did not exactly ‘think like us’ and did not look at (positive/given/physical) ‘reality’ as we do today

E.g., they did not have the same concepts of, health, happiness, the good life/death, not to mention very different views on the human body and its mal/functioning

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Methodological problems (for concluding discussion)

PROBLEM2: What confrontations with traditional disciplinary limitations/academic restrictions do we face?

🡪 Can we turn these to our advantage?

Did we manage to overcome these limitations? Yes, how? No, why not?
Questions arising from the side of the Medical Humanities may be anachronistic or inappropriate to the study of older material?
Is it methodologically sound to instrumentalise/‘abuse’ the Classics? Or should we rather say ‘reactivate’/‘redeploy’? What’s in a name?
Reasons for, and ways of, attaining an even more inclusive/holistic/integrative approach (mainly, but not exclusively, classically trained speakers),
How to bring together people working on different historical periods, cultures, languages, literatures, regions?
Suggestions for including other disciplines and comparative perspectives?

🡪 Break Hellenocentrism : Arabic/Syriac/Hebrew uptake, Medieval Studies, Ayurvedic or Chinese medical history, ancient Japan, Tibet, Mexico South America, …?

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Practicalities

20 speakers, 7 sessions:

10’ pitches
30’ roundtables:

overarching questions + paper-specific questions
share ideas, give feedback, look for common threads, recurrent themes

Full versions to be presented at 2022 conference
Proceedings 🡪 Peter Lang’s Medical Humanities: Criticism and Creativity

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Digital etiquette

Please:

Mute your microphone; unmute to intervene during the discussion
To ask a question, either:

type in the chat that you have a question,
or type your question in the chat, and the chair will read it out.

Type “finger” to follow-up on a running issue during the discussion
Speakers please be to the point and stick rigidly to your allotted time

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Thursday 9 September

12.50-13.00: Welcome
13.00-13.10: Introduction (Michiel Meeusen)
13.10-14.10: Session 1 (chair: Michiel Meeusen)

13.10-13.20: Mary Margaret McCabe (KCL), “Health’s Trousers”
13.20-13.30: Edith Hall (KCL/Durham), “Psychic Pain and its Survival: The Chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon”
13.30-13.40: Chiara Blanco (Edinburgh), “Disease, Community and Communication from Antiquity to Today”
13.40-14.10: roundtable discussion

14.10-15.10: Session 2 (chair: Michael Trapp)

14.10-14.20: Tania Gergel (KCL), “Odysseus and the Sirens - can a Homeric myth offer insights for contemporary psychiatry?”
14.20-14.30: Nephele Papakonstantinou (Sorbonne/Athens), “Embodied emotions and the self in Roman Rhetorical Education under the High Empire”
14.30-14.40: Chiara Thumiger (Kiel), “‘Cura eum possideat’. Disease as animal, disease as plant”
14.40-15.10: roundtable discussion

15.10-15.30: Tea
15.30-16.30: Session 3 (chair: Brian Hurwitz)

15.30-15.40: Peter Meineck (NYU), “(Re) Performing Trauma – A Field Report”
15.40-15.50: Ellen Adams (KCL), “Blindness: classical antiquity and modernity”
15.60-16.00: Susan Deacy (Roehampton), ‘Sounds like being autistic’: how the ‘classical tradition’, especially myths of Hercules, resonates with autism
16.00-16.30: roundtable discussion

16.30-17.30: Session 4 (chair: Michiel Meeusen)

16.30-16.40: Daniel King (Exeter), “Reading the Ill Body: Diagnosis as an explanatory process in Imperial medicine and culture”
16.40-16.50: Kassandra Miller (Colby College), “Who Has Time to Exercise? Health, Leisure, and Identity in Galen’s On Hygiene”
16.50-17.00: Colin Webster (UC Davis), “On Living Longer and Dying More: Empirical and Imperial Epistemologies in Antiquity and the Present.”
17.00-17.30: roundtable discussion

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Friday 10 September

9.00-9.10: Welcome
9.10-10.10: Session 5 (chair: Brian Hurwitz)

9.10-9.20: John Boulton (University of Newcastle, NSW), “Dignitas infanti mortuo”
9.20-9.30: John Ward (University of Newcastle, NSW), “Corellius’s choice: autonomy, ethics, and dying with dignity”
9.30-9.40: Vasiliki Kondylaki (Lausanne), “Achilles’ ἄχος in the Iliad: Homer as a grief therapist?”
9.40-10.10: roundtable discussion

10.10-11.10: Session 6 (chair: Michiel Meeusen)

10.10-10.20: Brian Hurwitz (KCL), “A New Rationale for the Performance of Trickery as Treatment in Epidemics VI 5.7”
10.20-10.30: Loren Demol (Macquarie University), “Patient Care in Ancient Graeco-Roman Medicine”
10.30-10.40: Saloni de Souza (UCL), “When the Age is in, So is the Wit: Old Age in Health and Social Care”
10.40-11.10: roundtable discussion

11.10-11.20: Coffee
11.20-12.00: Session 7 (chair: Michael Trapp)

11.20-11.30: Georgia Petridou (Liverpool), “‘Apollo’s Arrow’, Aelius Aristides, and the Antonine Plague: Ancient Epidemics and the ‘Wisdom of the Past’”
11.30-11.40: Corinne Saunders (Durham), “Dark Nights and Visionary Moments: Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval Narrative”
11.40-12.00: roundtable discussion

12.00-…: General discussion, future plans, conclusion