Binding: Hardcover
Description: 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.
Title: Tools And The Organism Technology And The Body In Ancient Greek And Roman Medicine
Author(s): Webster Colin
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press
Barcode: 9780226828770
Pages: 320 Pages, 23 Halftones
Publication Date: 11/24/2023
Category: History Of Medicine