39th Meeting of the Interdisciplinary Conference “Alte Medizin”, June 15-16, 2019

A blog post by Aleksandar Milenković.

On June 15-16 2019, the 39th meeting of the interdisciplinary conference “Ancient Medicine” (Alte Medizin) was held at the Institute for History, Theory and Ethics at the University of Medicine in Mainz, organized by Prof. Dr. Tanja Pommerening and Prof. Dr. Norbert W. Paul. As always, the goal of the conference is to initiate a dialogue among modern researchers regarding the practice of medicine in ancient cultures. The special feature of the conference is the already well-established platform where scholars from various disciplines in humanities as well as medicine raise questions about medical knowledge of the Greco-Roman, ancient Egyptian, and ancient Near Eastern cultures, examine the reception of this knowledge, and using interdisciplinary methods offer fresh insights. 

Fig. 1: Book of abstracts.

Untold and Inexpressible

The aim of this year’s conference, titled “Untold and Inexpressible: Gaps and Ambiguities in Medicine as an Epistemological Challenge” (Fig. 1) was to discuss methods which were used to bridge gaps in the history of medicine as well as in the communication processes between the patient and the physician in modern medicine. The ambiguities in the communication about illness today lie for example in the different approaches and categorizations of symptoms and ailments familiar to patients and physicians respectively. Those ambiguities also appear when researching historical sources. The gaps in communication and in the materials that have been preserved (both texts and objects) can only be filled by the use of scientific methods. For the historical part, most valuable methods have been conceptual metaphor theory, prototype theory and translation theory, to name a few. The papers presented at the conference aimed to address a methodological perspective in assessing these matters and attempting to bridge a gap between categories in the mind of the patient and the physician, as well as in the mind of the Ancients and us, if possible. Additionally, it was examined how those gaps have been filled by former scholars.

After an introduction by Tanja Pommerening and Norbert Paul, the conference started with the lecture of Davina Höll, a PhD candidate of the RTG Life Sciences – Life Writing in Mainz. In her interdisciplinary approach, she spoke about the inexpressible in the context of cholera in 19th-century European literature. She showed the discrepancy between the disease being a central topic in letters and diaries, and its absence in literature of the same time. Her talk was the perfect opener to capture the problems in working with historical sources. It was followed by nine presentations looking at the material of more remote times. Only some of them are pointed out here. For more detailed information, see the book of abstracts.

The problem of classifying diseases was addressed in the talk given by Lennart Lehmhaus, who presented examples from traditions of late-antique rabbinic Judaism, in which medical texts do not belong to a special genre, but rather to higher level religious-legal texts. The question of a textual gap was raised by Lutz Alexander Graumann who spoke about the case of clubfoot (Klumpfuß), a foot malformation found in the Hippocratic treatise De articulis. Although a common disease, it does not appear in medical texts between Galen in the 2nd century AD and Arcaeus in the 16th century. Natalia Tsoumpra addressed the question of shame as a “gap” in the patient-physician communication in Greek medical texts. She indicated that shame plays a very important role especially with female patients, which is why a common symptom recorded by physicians when treating women was “voicelessness”.

Approaching implicit knowledge of ancient cultures

Two members of our RTG presented their results in this year’s Alte Medizin. Ulrike Steinert (Fig. 2) offered an example of the above-mentioned difficulties in her talk titled “Unravelling implicit medical knowledge in ancient Mesopotamian women’s health care texts”. Ulrike aimed to draw the attention to limits and possibilities of reconstructing implicit knowledge in Mesopotamian medical texts. As she explained, these cuneiform texts contain formulae that are oftentimes abbreviated or prosaic. Additionally, the drug names can be misleading or ambiguous, while the exact quantities of drugs are not always listed, which means that understanding these texts poses a problem for a modern reader. As she went on to show, it is, however, still possible to extract the implicit knowledge from these materials with the help of comments inserted by later copyists or variants in duplicating manuscripts, as well as with the help of conceptual metaphor theory and medical anthropology. 

Fig. 2: Ulrike Steinert presenting her paper. (Photo: Mari Yamasaki)

On the other hand, Jonny Russell (Fig. 3) shared examples of such ambiguities from ancient Egyptian medical texts in his talk titled “Exploring the untold: explanatory models of inner physiology in Egyptian healing compendia”. As Jonny underlined, although there are around 2000 prescriptions for various diseases, materials that he examines offer very rare explicit information about Egyptian healing theory. This fact led some of the early translators and editors of Egyptian medical manuscripts to use modern terminology when referring to the human body, whereas Jonny is asking if modern terms such as “heart”, “stomach” and “belly” are reliable in the context of Egyptian ethnomedicine. Opting for an emic perspective and with the help of comparative lexicography, etymology and conceptual metaphor theory, Jonny offers another way to understand and discuss inner physiology and systems of classification in ancient Egyptian medicine. 

Fig. 3: Jonny Russell presenting his paper. (Photo: Mari Yamasaki)

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The conference brought together scholars of various backgrounds and interests and the discussions proved to be fruitful and engaging, both those during the conference and those during the dinner, where discussions continued. It also marked the first collaboration between our RTG Early Concepts of Humans and Nature and the RTG Life Sciences – Life Writings, as speakers of both RTGs are the organizers of the Alte Medizin conference. We are very much looking forward to next year’s lectures and the 40-year jubilee.