The Healing Classics

1. Aim of the Book

What potential relevance does the experience of Graeco-Roman Antiquity have to the vastly expanding field of the Medical Humanities and its contribution to ‘humanizing’ contemporary medicine and healthcare? And again, how can the insights from the relatively young Medical Humanities enhance our understanding of the ancient Greek and Roman past, a past often still surprisingly relevant today? In an attempt to critically and creatively approach these two complementary questions, the central aim of this book is to promote a constructive dialogue between the disciplines of the Classics (Classical Studies), on the one hand, and the broadly defined Medical Humanities (or Health Humanities), on the other.1

The Medical Humanities interrogates the values which suffuse health and disease beliefs and practices; it focuses on the lived experiences and cultural and social meanings of well-being and illness through the lenses of humanities, social sciences and creative arts scholarship.2 But ‘[a] properly critical medical humanities is also a historically grounded medical humanities’.3 By turning to, and drawing inspiration from, ancient Greek and Roman sources (medical or otherwise) and by holding these materials against the light of both historical and contemporary medicine/health-related beliefs, practices, interests and debates, the volume is intended to yield fresh insights into several important, at times indeed profoundly delicate and sensitive issues, such as the ideology of health, somatic health and psychological well-being, the importance of professional ethics, narratives of illness, patient care, diagnosis and authority issues, incapacitating pain and disability, and the confrontation with old age and mortality.

What does it mean to be a ‘healthy’ human being? What is the value of making ‘sense’ of trauma and loss? What are the role, value and requirements of ‘human’ qualities in the context of healthcare? What useful strategies do ancient sources propose for living ‘well’ with chronic pain, disability or illness? And what about the ‘good death’ as an ultimate resort? Central to the book’s endeavour is to explore and debate the continuing vitality and creativity inherent in the Classical tradition, hence also its specific interest in how Antiquity, at the level of motifs, myths and texts, is filtered in today’s healthcare practices, most notably in creative/expressive arts therapy.

While looking for novel, hitherto unexplored perspectives and meaningful directions in which this interdisciplinary research paradigm could develop further, the book also aims to take stock of past achievements situated at the junction of these two fields. The last decade has seen a surge in publications related to Classics and Medical Humanities, to which the present book aims to make a meaningful contribution.4 While the Hippocratic triangulation of doctors, patients and diseases in Antiquity has been – and continues to be – explored from a wide variety of intellectual, political, and cultural-historical perspectives by medical historians, the often highly specialized results of this research have started to receive a good deal of traction with the larger scholarly community. Important questions that have emerged in the last years relate, most notably, to the patient’s perspective in the context of health and healthcare and the individual experience of illness, pain and disability in Antiquity – to the extent that a recalibration with the wider community seems in order. To this end, the contributions in the first section seek to explore, in a variety of ways, the broad theme of ‘Health in/and Community’ (detailed in the synopsis below, sub 4). Questions relating to the cultural construction of health and illness and ancient conceptualizations of healthcare and therapeutic practices provide new opportunities for research too. These topics are addressed in contributions in the second and third sections dealing with ‘Disease, Well-being and Healthcare Interactions’ and ‘Imperial Constructions of Health’, respectively. Another major research area that has started to take more central stage in recent scholarship concerns the history of emotions and ancient psychology, while, parallel to this, intellectual historical approaches to ancient health from the perspectives of ancient philosophy, mentality and religion continue to offer new conceptual frameworks and new meanings to think with. Here, too, there is space for a more synthetical approach, it seems, namely by exploring the intersection of ancient affective and intellectual paradigms, especially in confrontations with psychosomatic dis/entangling. This topic is explored in the contributions in the fourth section on ‘Death, Grief and Dignity’.

We are dealing, in short, with a particularly broad and challenging field of study that, owing to its historical weight and timeless allure, still continues to be relevant, inspirational and meaningful today. In its very broad thematic approach, The Healing Classics draws gratefully on these various research strands but hopes also to strengthen the approach they represent and move it in new directions. The book is thus a pioneering venture, though one that makes no claim to completeness; any gap that the critical reader will spot should be interpreted charitably as a stimulus for further research. As to intended readership (cui bono), the book aims to address an interdisciplinary range of scholars, specifically classicists working on ancient health- and medicine-related topics from a forward-looking perspective as well as those more familiar with modern healthcare environments looking to enrich their historical understanding of the field and its potential for transhistorical relevance. It is hoped that the contributions will also be found relevant by instructors in the classroom teaching subjects such as classical literature, history of medicine and ideas, comparative approaches to the ancient and modern world and, of course, medical humanities broadly defined.

2. Definition Matters

As so often, definition – the prison of ideas – remains a difficult struggle, and one wonders whose struggle it really is. What we mean by ‘the Classics’ and ‘the Medical Humanities’ should be sufficiently established for scholars working in either field. Yet, for the uninitiated reader, and for scholars not as familiar with what is going on ‘on the other side’, a brief definition of each field is a scholarly courtesy and offers an orientating schema to what the book is about.

3. Interdisciplinary Relevance and Approach

What about the mutual relevance of the Classics and the Medical Humanities? On the one hand, the relevance of the Classics for the Medical Humanities can be seen in the deeply human kind of questions and concerns which the ancient materials aimed to address: topics like clinical interactions, patient experiences, disease narratives, mental health, treatments and healings, trauma and other major areas of inquiry in the Medical Humanities, which are also major areas of concern in real life health practice. Although the answers that the ancient sources provide to such questions may sometimes appear frustratingly outdated, most of the questions themselves definitely are not.9

4. Structure and Contents

In an attempt to present the collected contents in a more or less logical order, the volume has been subdivided into four thematic clusters, each of which have both theoretical interest and potential practical ramifications. The first cluster gathers three contributions broadly concerned with the topic of ‘Health in/and Community’. Mary Margaret McCabe kicks off with a chapter that tackles the conceptual primacy of ‘health’ over ‘disease’ in ancient philosophy, opposing it to our modern, reversed way of thinking (‘Health’s Trousers’). She explores how some ancient accounts contextualize health within a community, across a broad spectrum of value and as a property of a life, arguing that to think about community value in terms of lives is transformative. How these ideas can be put into practice is shown by the contribution of Desiree Sanchez and Peter Meineck, which describes their theatre work with American combat veterans that uses ancient Greek performance texts to foster dialogue between veterans and the public and creates supportive and active theatrical communities centred around dealing with combat trauma, going beyond the therapeutic in a purely medical sense (‘(Re)Performing Trauma – A Field Report’). By way of case-study, Edith Hall subsequently zooms in on the trauma vividly related by the community voice of the chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, arguing that despite their misery there is some sense of resistance and hope in their words, which could be used to help traumatized individuals explore their pain while committing to survival (‘Sorrow but Survival: The Therapeutic Moral Example of the Chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon’).