Medicine and Disease in the Pre-Modern I

Throughout the classical and post-classical periods, medical actors from different social and intellectual backgrounds aimed to make sense of the human body and disease, and worked to provide treatments and preserve health. In this class we will consider who these actors were, examining the categories of learned physicians versus practitioners and studying the role women played in health care. We will study practices of medical education and evaluate regulatory systems that determined access to the medical profession. We will also consider how physicians believed they could obtain knowledge about medical phenomena, and how they theorized human pathology, physiology, and epidemics. We will ask to what extent the theoretical, written treatises that survive today are representative of everyday medical practice in pre-modern West Asia. We inspect additional archeological evidence such as talismans and magic bowls in order to study popular and religious medical approaches. We will do this while tracing the development of the Greco-Arabic medical tradition alongside evolving Islamic theological views and Prophetic medicine, covering a period of roughly five centuries from the early ʿAbbasid period to the Black Death in the 14th century.