How Babylonian is the Hippocratic corpus?

The last seminar in the 2015–16 History of Pre-Modern Medicine Seminar Series takes place on Tuesday 1 March.

Library of Ashurbanipal, tablet, Neo-Assyrian, Kouyunjik. Written in cuneiform, 700 BC–600 BC. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Speaker:

Professor Mark Geller (Freie Universität, Berlin)

How Babylonian is the Hippocratic corpus?

Abstract:

The topic of similarities and possible commonalities between Hippocratic and Babylonian medicine continues to attract comment and debate, which this seminar paper will address. The discussion will involve comparisons of both the content and the form of Hippocratic treatises with contemporary Babylonian medical tablets (such as the one depicted above), to argue for a more global view of ancient medicine in the Mediterranean and ancient Near East in the time of Hippocrates and his followers.

Location:

Wellcome Library, 183 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.

Doors open at 6pm, seminar will start at 6.15pm.

The seminar series is focused on pre-modern medicine, which we take to cover European and non-European history before the 20th century (antiquity, medieval and early modern history, some elements of 19th century medicine).

Further details on the seminar series are available in a previous post.