Time and Ancient Medicine: How Sundials and Water Clocks Changed Medical Science

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Prof Kassandra J. Miller (Assistant Professor of Classics, Assistant Professor of Classics, Colby College)

Time and Ancient Medicine

How Sundials and Water Clocks Changed Medical Science

Prof Kassandra J. Miller (Assistant Professor of Classics, Assistant Professor of Classics, Colby College)

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English

Oxford University Press
07 September 2023

Classical history & classical civilisation; History of science; Time (chronology), time systems & standards

Time and Ancient Medicine is the first monograph to explore, on the one hand, how the introduction of new timekeeping technologies (namely, sundials and water clocks) affected the practice, rhetoric, and philosophy of ancient medicine and, on the other hand, how medical timekeeping practices affected engagement with time elsewhere in society. The study seeks, first, to offer a chronological narrative of how timekeeping technologies and medical practices evolved and influenced one another in ancient Greece and Rome, with consideration of relevant Pharaonic Egyptian and Assyro-Babylonian precedents. Kassandra J. Miller turns to a series of case studies, drawn from the Roman Imperial period, to investigate thematic questions, asking how debates over medical timekeeping interacted with debates over proper scientific methodology, the status of medicine as a formal art, and the relationships between medicine and other disciplines like mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. Throughout, this study places epigraphic, artistic, and other material evidence for hourly timekeeping in dialogue with selections from medical literature, some of which has not previously been published in modern-language translation. Ultimately, this study reveals that time and timekeeping played fundamental roles in ancient medical debates and practices and challenges the traditional narrative that the social history of

By: Prof Kassandra J. Miller (Assistant Professor of Classics Assistant Professor of Classics Colby College)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 164mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 538g
ISBN: 9780198885177
ISBN 10: 0198885172
Pages: 246
Publication Date: 07 September 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Introduction 1: Telling Time in the Greco-Roman World 2: Doctors and Clocks: The Emergence of Hourly Timekeeping in Medical Contexts 3: Clocks as Symbols 1: In Galen's Thought 4: Clocks as Symbols 2: Among the Roman Elite 5: From ""Season"" to ""Hour"": Galenic Refinements of the Hippocratic Hora 6: When is Temporal Exactitude Desirable? 7: ""Right Timing"" in Sickness and in Health: Hourly Timekeeping and Kairos in Galen's On Hygiene Conclusion: From Antiquity to Modernity"

Kassandra J. Miller earned her PhD in Classics at the University of Chicago. She has been an Assistant Professor of Classics at Colby College since 2020, and previously taught in Classics departments at Bard College and Union College. She co-edited and contributed to the volume Down to the Hour: Short Time in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East (2020) and has published articles and book chapters on Greco-Roman timekeeping, medicine, magic, and mythology.

Reviews for Time and Ancient Medicine: How Sundials and Water Clocks Changed Medical Science

Miller has given us a well written, lucid, and erudite synthesis of the topic, and I am certain that this stimulating book will find many admirers. * Greece & Rome * The volume is therefore primarily addressed to scholars of ancient medicine, especially of Galen, who will find here a reconstruction of Galen's view of the use of time in medicine and its implications, which was primarily philosophical and therefore methodological. * Irene Calà, Project Muse * This monograph will be of considerable benefit to the field of ancient medicine, and the history of medicine more broadly as medical theory and practice in classical antiquity exercised a huge amount of influence over the discipline for centuries. * Jane Draycott, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Societ *