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The Art is Long
On the Sacred Disease and the Scientific Tradition
Series: - Studies in Ancient Medicine, Volume: 25
Author:
This volume examines the fifth-century medical treatise, On the Sacred Disease, as a sophistic speech, and considers its position within the scientific tradition. The first part concerns conceptions of science, magic, and medicine; and establishes the antiquity of medicine as a specialized skill. The latter part analyzes the treatise in light of sophistic oratory, and explores its reception of traditional beliefs. This analysis shows that traditional beliefs, competition, and rhetoric contributed to the intellectual tradition of science. Traditional views are shown to have influenced ideas concerning physiology, and disease aetiology and transmission, Competition, expressed in the terms of sophistic debate, sharpened the author's arguments. On the Sacred Disease is important evidence for the influence on fifth-century medicine of both sophistic rhetoric and of older medical traditions.
Julie Laskaris is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Richmond. She has published on ancient medicine in the 1996 and 1999 proceedings of the Colloque International Hippocratique.
All those interested in intellectual history, the history of science, the history of medicine, ancient magic and religion, and rhetoric, especially classicists, historians, and physicians.