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The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine
Series: - Studies in Ancient Medicine, Volume: 49
Editor:
The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine explores how analogy and metaphor illuminate and shape conceptions about the human body and disease, through 11 case studies from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.
John Z. Wee, Ph.D. (2012), Yale University, is Assistant Professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of books and articles on medicine and astronomy in Mesopotamian and Greco-Roman antiquity, including
Knowledge and Rhetoric in Medical Commentary (Brill, 2018).
Contributors are: M. Erica Couto-Ferreira, Lesley Dean-Jones, Janet Downie, Brooke Holmes, J. Cale Johnson, Paul T. Keyser, Rune Nyord, Strahil Valentinov Panayotov, Courtney Ann Roby, Ulrike Steinert, John Z. Wee
Contributors are: M. Erica Couto-Ferreira, Lesley Dean-Jones, Janet Downie, Brooke Holmes, J. Cale Johnson, Paul T. Keyser, Rune Nyord, Strahil Valentinov Panayotov, Courtney Ann Roby, Ulrike Steinert, John Z. Wee
"This book provides wide-ranging, thought-provoking material from across a spectrum of ancient sources. It includes extensive chapter bibliographies and an index locorum of referenced ancient texts. Aimed primarily at the specialist reader, the book clearly demonstrates the contribution that metaphorical theory can make to this field and provides a valuable addition to the literature." Rosalie David, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, Vol. 110 No. 3, Sept 2019.
" The Comparable Body is an important book, which maps a burgeoning area of research, offers insightful theoretical comments and fulfills the goal of letting in-depth case-studies bring into focus related issues which would have gone unnoticed otherwise. (...) Moreover, many contributions analyze how ancient interpreters – the authors of compendia and commentaries – dealt with the issue of interpreting (what we consider as) metaphors: this opens up an interesting perspective on how the ancient literate milieus have dealt with the very same phenomena analyzed in this book. Lastly, the question of the universality as opposed to the culturally situated nature of bodily metaphors not only receives sustained theoretical attention (see mainly Chapters 1, 3 and 9), but is also substantiated by the wealth of examples showing both the cross-cultural recurrence and the local variations of some metaphorical patterns, such as those recruiting botanical phenomena (Chapters 7, 8, 10, 11), landscape features (Chapters 3, 5, 9) or social interactions (Chapters 3, 7, 11)."
Alessandro Buccheri in CJ-online 2021.04.05
" The Comparable Body is an important book, which maps a burgeoning area of research, offers insightful theoretical comments and fulfills the goal of letting in-depth case-studies bring into focus related issues which would have gone unnoticed otherwise. (...) Moreover, many contributions analyze how ancient interpreters – the authors of compendia and commentaries – dealt with the issue of interpreting (what we consider as) metaphors: this opens up an interesting perspective on how the ancient literate milieus have dealt with the very same phenomena analyzed in this book. Lastly, the question of the universality as opposed to the culturally situated nature of bodily metaphors not only receives sustained theoretical attention (see mainly Chapters 1, 3 and 9), but is also substantiated by the wealth of examples showing both the cross-cultural recurrence and the local variations of some metaphorical patterns, such as those recruiting botanical phenomena (Chapters 7, 8, 10, 11), landscape features (Chapters 3, 5, 9) or social interactions (Chapters 3, 7, 11)."
Alessandro Buccheri in CJ-online 2021.04.05
Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
Abbreviations
Transliteration Notes
Periodization of Ancient Mesopotamia
Contributors
Introduction: To What May I Liken Metaphor?
John Z. Wee 1
Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Medicine and the Ancient Egyptian Conceptualisation of Heat in the Body
Rune Nyord 2
From Head to Toe: Listing the Body in Cuneiform Texts
M. Erica Couto-Ferreira 3
The Stuff of Causation: Etiological Metaphor and Pathogenic Channeling in Babylonian Medicine
J. Cale Johnson 4
Aristotle’s Heart and the Heartless Man
Lesley Dean-Jones 5
Earthquake and Epilepsy: The Body Geologic in the Hippocratic Treatise on the Sacred Disease
John Z. Wee 6
The Lineage of “Bloodlines”: Synecdoche, Metonymy, Medicine and More
Paul T. Keyser 7
Eye Metaphors, Analogies and Similes within Mesopotamian Magico-Medical Texts
Strahil V. Panayotov 8
The Experience and Description of Pain in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi
Janet Downie 9
Concepts of the Female Body in Mesopotamian Gynecological Texts
Ulrike Steinert 10
Pure Life: The Limits of the Vegetal Analogy in the Hippocratics and Galen
Brooke Holmes 11
Animal, Vegetable, Metaphor: Plotinus’s Liver and the Roots of Biological Identity
Courtney Ann Roby
Index Locorum
All interested in ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine, as well as broader questions of scientific language and metaphor theory.