CLAS 3140

This course will look at how the body was viewed in ancient scientific theory and practice. Western medicine as a rationalized scientific practice finds it origins in the ancient Greek philosophical and medical texts attributed to “Hippocrates”. Through a close reading of selected ancient medical texts, this course will explore ideas of how the human body is constituted, how it relates to the Cosmos as a whole, what the role of the physician was seen to be, and how illness and healing were seen as changes in the balance of the components of the body.