Autumn Term 2010

[by clicking on the subject in question, essential and further literature for each topic can be downloaded]

Week 1: Introduction: what is medical history?

Week 2: The prehistory of medicine: from Mythos to Logos

Week 3: Hippocrates and the Sacred Disease: the emergence of Rational Medicine

Week 4: The problem of the Hippocratic Corpus: different views by different authors

Week 5: Medical deontology: between the Hippocratic Oath and quackery

Reading Week Practice Essay: “Hippocratic medicine as developed in On the Sacred Disease departs radically from previous explanations of sickness and health in that conceives of disease in a purely rational manner.” Discuss.

Week 7: Temple medicine: Asclepius, doctor or demon?

Week 8: Medicine in Alexandria: Erasistratus and Herophilus

Week 9: Female practitioners and patients: women’s place in medicine

Week 10: The Sects: the fight between rationalists and empiricists

Spring Term 2011

Week 1: The emergence of Methodism: 6 months enough to study medicine? [further reading here]

Week 2: Rufus of Ephesus On Melancholy: A case study [further reading here]

Week 3: Medicine in Rome: Caesars and doctors

Week 4: The Great Galen: the triumph of humoral pathology [reading for Thursday: Galen, The Soul’s Dependence on the Body]

Week 5: Medicine in the Roman Army: from dressing station to field hospital?

Reading Week

Week 7: Medicine and Christianity: Healers and Hospices

Week 8: Galenism: nothing will ever be the same again

Week 9: Medicine in Late Antiquity: between commentary, abridgment and encyclopedia

Week 10: The Islamic Tradition

Summer Term 2011

Week 1: The Latin Middle Ages and Renaissance medicine: a clash of cultures?

Week 2: Beginnings and endings, respect and rejection: the continuous presences of classical medicine

Week 3/4: revision