Webinaire : Alain TOUWAIDE, “Identifying Pathologies through Therapy : A New Approach to Ancient Diseases”

Auteur : Alain TOUWAIDE

Organisateur : Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR)

Lieu : En ligne

Date : 30 Septembre 2021, 18h-20h (heure de Paris)

L’événement est en accès gratuit pour tous, mais il est nécessaire de s’enregistrer au préalable. Pour vous enregistrer, cliquez ici.

Pour tout contact : info@csmbr.fondazionecomel.org

Présentation par l’organisateur :

Identifying the medical conditions mentioned in the ancient literature, be these medical or otherwise, is a challenging task in medical history. Whereas scholars have claimed that diseases such as the plague are impossible to retrace because of the mutations of pathogens, the retrospective diagnostic technique formulated by Mirko Grmek (1924-2000) opened the way to a better understanding of medical conditions in classical antiquity.

Most recently, however, bio-molecular research has been successful in identifying some pathogens from archaeological remains. However productive they might be, these new methods do not allow for either the identification of a broader range of medical conditions or a quantitative, viz. epidemiological reconstruction of the populations’ health at any given point in time. This lecture will explore a new approach: by positing those ancient manuals of therapeutics reflect the pathological reality of their time, it will explore the very limits and possibilities of such an approach, with the many questions it raises and the perspective it opens. Particular attention will be devoted to the present-day pharmacological analysis of plants (along with the medical conditions on which plants are efficacious) as a key to a reverse identification of pathologies that are not necessarily identified with precision ab initio.