The first book to show how the concept of bodily organs emerged and
how ancient tools influenced conceptualizations of human anatomy and
its operations. Medicine is itself a type of technology, involving
therapeutic tools and substances, and so one can write the history of
medicine as the application of different technologies to the human
body. In Tools and the Organism, Colin Webster argues that, throughout
antiquity, these tools were crucial to broader theoretical shifts.
Notions changed about what type of object a body is, what substances
constitute its essential nature, and how its parts interact. By
following these changes and taking the question of technology into the
heart of Greek and Roman medicine, Webster reveals how the body was
first conceptualized as an “organism”—a functional object whose
inner parts were tools, or organa, that each completed certain vital
tasks. He also shows how different medical tools created different
bodies. Webster’s approach provides both an overarching survey of
the ways that technologies impacted notions of corporeality and
corporeal behaviors and, at the same time, stays attentive to the
specific material details of ancient tools and how they informed
assumptions about somatic structures, substances, and inner processes.
For example, by turning to developments in water-delivery technologies
and pneumatic tools, we see how these changing material realities
altered theories of the vascular system and respiration across
Classical antiquity. Tools and the Organism makes the compelling case
for why telling the history of ancient Greco-Roman medical theories,
from the Hippocratics to Galen, should pay close attention to the
question of technology.
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Technology and the Body in Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226828787
Publisert
2023
Utgiver
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter