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.
Author(s): Z John Wee
Series: Studies in Ancient Medicine, 49
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 460
City: Leiden
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
Abbreviations
Transliteration Notes
Periodization of Ancient Mesopotamia
Contributors
Introduction: To What May I Liken Metaphor?
Chapter 1 Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Medicine and the Ancient Egyptian Conceptualisation of Heat in the Body
Chapter 2 From Head to Toe: Listing the Body in Cuneiform Texts
Chapter 3 The Stuff of Causation: Etiological Metaphor and Pathogenic Channeling in Babylonian Medicine
Chapter 4 Aristotle’s Heart and the Heartless Man
Chapter 5 Earthquake and Epilepsy: The Body Geologic in the Hippocratic Treatise On the Sacred Disease
Chapter 6 The Lineage of “Bloodlines”: Synecdoche, Metonymy, Medicine, and More
Chapter 7 Eye Metaphors, Analogies and Similes within Mesopotamian Magico-Medical Texts
Chapter 8 The Experience and Description of Pain in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi
Chapter 9 Concepts of the Female Body in Mesopotamian Gynecological Texts
Chapter 10 Pure Life: The Limits of the Vegetal Analogy in the Hippocratics and Galen
Chapter 11 Animal, Vegetable, Metaphor: Plotinus’s Liver and the Roots of Biological Identity
Index Locorum
General Index
