Rebecca Flemming
Biographic Data
| ID | 371023 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Flemming |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Flemming |
| SIGNATURE | FLEMMING R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Biography, Women and Power
Julia Hillner's life of Helena, mother of Constantine, is the twentieth volume published in OUP's ‘Women in Antiquity’ series, launched in 2010 with Duane Roller's biography of Cleopatra. An earlier and overlapping series on the same theme — Routledge's ‘Women of the Ancient World’ — began in 2006 and adds a further half-dozen titles to the portfolio, from Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great by Elizbeth Carney to The Women of Pliny's Letters …
Pandemics in the Ancient Mediterranean World
This essay outlines the kinds of evidence available (and not available) for studies of ancient Mediterranean pandemics, the scholarship on the subject so far, and some reflections on the relationship between the two. The focus is on the three largescale epidemic episodes that have attracted the most scholarly attention: the "Plague of Athens" in the fifth century BCE; the "Antonine Plague," which spread across the Roman Empire in the late second …
The Classical Clitoris
This article provides a global and focused survey of the rich surviving evidence for the classical Greek and Roman clitoris (or nymph). It starts with the surviving anatomical descriptions, with the clitoris in its healthy, according to nature condition, and explores the different attitudes and understandings that were articulated in this context. Then it moves to the clitoris contrary to nature, examining the pathologies delineated in the medica…
Fertility control in ancient Rome
This paper surveys and evaluates the range of methods recommended mostly to promote but also to prevent pregnancy in ancient Rome, and then discusses the practices of adult adoption and infant exposure in more detail in order to interrogate the notion of 'fertility control' from an ancient historical perspective. Is this formulation sufficiently flexible to encompass Roman procreative projects and the resources they were able to bring to bear on …
Medicine and Markets in the Graeco-Roman World and Beyond
Reproduction
Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire by Ido Israelowich
Reviewed by: Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire by Ido Israelowich Rebecca Flemming Ido Israelowich. Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. viii + 191 pp. Ill. $59.95 (978-1-4214-1628-1). This book promises a more holistic and encompassing study of health care in the Roman Empire than has hitherto been provided in the scholarly literature. Rather than privileging the practitioner…
Patricia A. Baker, The Archaeology of Medicine in the Greco-Roman World
The material record has much to offer the study of ancient medicine, but, as Patricia Baker argues, it is, at present, an under-exploited and poorly understood resource. Hence this book: a brief, didactic introduction to the kinds of relevant archaeological evidence available, and to sufficient archaeological method to begin to make effective use of it, in order to facilitate and encourage the proper integration of material culture into the study…
The Invention of Infertility in the Classical Greek World
The article examines the understandings of, and responses to, reproductive failure in the classical Greek world. It discusses explanations and treatments for non-procreation in a range of ancient Greek medical texts, focusing on the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, which devote considerable energy to matters of fertility and generation, and places them alongside the availability of a divine approach to dealing with reproductive disruption, the…
The Philosophy of Antiochus
Antiochus of Ascalon was one of the seminal philosophers of the first century BC, an era of radical philosophical change. Some called him a virtual Stoic, but in reality his programme was an updated revival of the philosophy of the 'ancients', meaning above all Plato and Aristotle. His significance lies partly in his enormous influence on Roman intellectuals of the age, including Cicero, Brutus and Varro, partly in his role as the harbinger of a …
Commentary
In his biobibliographical treatise, On My Own Books (Lib.Prop.), Galen categorizes a significant segment of his vast written array according to the past authority (or authorities) with whose works, or wider thought, they are engaged. The names of Hippocrates, Erasistratus, Asclepiades (of Bithynia), Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus, as well as the collectivities of the Empiricists, Methodists and Stoics, all appear in chapter headings as having attr…
Galen's imperial order of knowledge
Order (taxis) is a vital matter for the great imperial physician Galen of Pergamum. Sound method (in all things) depends on it: on beginning at the beginning and proceeding systematically through all the requisite stages until the goal is attained. It is, moreover, a test that most in the medical field fail. Galen's total commitment to good order provides him with a measure against which his rivals (past and present) can be measured and found wan…
Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire
The Romans commanded the largest and most complex empire the world had ever seen, or would see until modern times. The challenges, however, were not just political, economic and military: Rome was also the hub of a vast information network, drawing in worldwide expertise and refashioning it for its own purposes. This fascinating collection of essays considers the dialogue between technical literature and imperial society, drawing on, developing a…
Festus and the Role of Women in Roman Religion
Women, Writing and Medicine in the Classical World
It is now a well-established fact that women practised medicine in the ancient world. The medica or iatrine-the specifically female version of the physician, the medicus or iatros-as well as the obstetrix or maia-the midwife-along with a number of linguistic variants on these terms, all appear regularly in a range of literary, epigraphical and papyrological sources, as scholars have repeatedly observed. 1 How these appearances should be interpret…
Solitary Pleasures
Suicide, euthanasia and medicine
In this paper I explore just a few of the issues that are raised by what seem to be some rather serious shifts presently occurring in the modern order of death. My main focus is on the particular disturbances caused by the recently renewed demand for the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in much of the West; disturbances which I attempt to put into some kind of historical perspective. I argue that aspects of a new order of death are…
The Pathology of Pregnancy in Galen's Commentaries on the Epidemics
THE PATHOLOGY OF PREGNANCY IN GALEN's COMMENTARIES ON THE EPIDEMICS REBECCA FLEMMING REBECCA FLEMMING King's College London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Volume 45, Issue Supplement_77, January 2002, Pages 101–112, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2002.tb02283.x Published: 22 February 2011
Places in Man (review)
On a simple word-count, Elizabeth Craik notes, Places in Man ranks as the eleventh longest of the seventy-odd treatises that make up the Hippocratic Corpus. It is, moreover, extremely wide-ranging, covering aspects of anatomy, physiology, and gynecology, together with the causation and cure of disease, and a number of general points about the nature and practice of medicine; and it has also had an integral and significant part to play in the Hipp…
Eve's Herbs
Quae Corpore Quaestum Facit
Prostitution, it seems to be generally agreed, was a phenomenon firmly embedded in imperial Roman society. It has, however, yet to achieve a similar level of scholarly integration. Moves are undoubtedly being made in this direction. Several topics which have a direct bearing on patterns of prostitution, or in which prostitution is implicated, such as the complex hierarchy of male and female, the patterning of erotic desires and pleasures, the acq…
Hippocrates' Peri Partheniôn ('Diseases of Young Girls')
Diseases of young girls (DYG) exemplifies many of the intellectual and textual complexities of other treatises in the Hippocratic Corpus, the diverse collection of early medical writings associated with the name of Hippocrates from Hellenistic times onward to the present. The circumstances of its composition can be described only in a tentative, relative sense, rather than in any final or absolute way, and no individual author can be identified b…
Women, Writing and Medicine in the Classical World
It is now a well-established fact that women practised medicine in the ancient world. The medica or iatrine-the specifically female version of the physician, the medicus or iatros-as well as the obstetrix or maia-the midwife-along with a number of linguistic variants on these terms, all appear regularly in a range of literary, epigraphical and papyrological sources, as scholars have repeatedly observed. 1 How these appearances should be interpret…
Suicide, euthanasia and medicine
In this paper I explore just a few of the issues that are raised by what seem to be some rather serious shifts presently occurring in the modern order of death. My main focus is on the particular disturbances caused by the recently renewed demand for the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in much of the West; disturbances which I attempt to put into some kind of historical perspective. I argue that aspects of a new order of death are…
Pandemics in the Ancient Mediterranean World
This essay outlines the kinds of evidence available (and not available) for studies of ancient Mediterranean pandemics, the scholarship on the subject so far, and some reflections on the relationship between the two. The focus is on the three largescale epidemic episodes that have attracted the most scholarly attention: the "Plague of Athens" in the fifth century BCE; the "Antonine Plague," which spread across the Roman Empire in the late second …
Hippocrates' Peri Partheniôn ('Diseases of Young Girls')
Diseases of young girls (DYG) exemplifies many of the intellectual and textual complexities of other treatises in the Hippocratic Corpus, the diverse collection of early medical writings associated with the name of Hippocrates from Hellenistic times onward to the present. The circumstances of its composition can be described only in a tentative, relative sense, rather than in any final or absolute way, and no individual author can be identified b…
Eve's Herbs
Quae Corpore Quaestum Facit
Prostitution, it seems to be generally agreed, was a phenomenon firmly embedded in imperial Roman society. It has, however, yet to achieve a similar level of scholarly integration. Moves are undoubtedly being made in this direction. Several topics which have a direct bearing on patterns of prostitution, or in which prostitution is implicated, such as the complex hierarchy of male and female, the patterning of erotic desires and pleasures, the acq…
Places in Man (review)
On a simple word-count, Elizabeth Craik notes, Places in Man ranks as the eleventh longest of the seventy-odd treatises that make up the Hippocratic Corpus. It is, moreover, extremely wide-ranging, covering aspects of anatomy, physiology, and gynecology, together with the causation and cure of disease, and a number of general points about the nature and practice of medicine; and it has also had an integral and significant part to play in the Hipp…
The Pathology of Pregnancy in Galen's Commentaries on the Epidemics
THE PATHOLOGY OF PREGNANCY IN GALEN's COMMENTARIES ON THE EPIDEMICS REBECCA FLEMMING REBECCA FLEMMING King's College London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Volume 45, Issue Supplement_77, January 2002, Pages 101–112, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2002.tb02283.x Published: 22 February 2011
Suicide, euthanasia and medicine
In this paper I explore just a few of the issues that are raised by what seem to be some rather serious shifts presently occurring in the modern order of death. My main focus is on the particular disturbances caused by the recently renewed demand for the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in much of the West; disturbances which I attempt to put into some kind of historical perspective. I argue that aspects of a new order of death are…
Solitary Pleasures
Galen's imperial order of knowledge
Order (taxis) is a vital matter for the great imperial physician Galen of Pergamum. Sound method (in all things) depends on it: on beginning at the beginning and proceeding systematically through all the requisite stages until the goal is attained. It is, moreover, a test that most in the medical field fail. Galen's total commitment to good order provides him with a measure against which his rivals (past and present) can be measured and found wan…
Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire
The Romans commanded the largest and most complex empire the world had ever seen, or would see until modern times. The challenges, however, were not just political, economic and military: Rome was also the hub of a vast information network, drawing in worldwide expertise and refashioning it for its own purposes. This fascinating collection of essays considers the dialogue between technical literature and imperial society, drawing on, developing a…
Festus and the Role of Women in Roman Religion
Women, Writing and Medicine in the Classical World
It is now a well-established fact that women practised medicine in the ancient world. The medica or iatrine-the specifically female version of the physician, the medicus or iatros-as well as the obstetrix or maia-the midwife-along with a number of linguistic variants on these terms, all appear regularly in a range of literary, epigraphical and papyrological sources, as scholars have repeatedly observed. 1 How these appearances should be interpret…
Commentary
In his biobibliographical treatise, On My Own Books (Lib.Prop.), Galen categorizes a significant segment of his vast written array according to the past authority (or authorities) with whose works, or wider thought, they are engaged. The names of Hippocrates, Erasistratus, Asclepiades (of Bithynia), Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus, as well as the collectivities of the Empiricists, Methodists and Stoics, all appear in chapter headings as having attr…
The Philosophy of Antiochus
Antiochus of Ascalon was one of the seminal philosophers of the first century BC, an era of radical philosophical change. Some called him a virtual Stoic, but in reality his programme was an updated revival of the philosophy of the 'ancients', meaning above all Plato and Aristotle. His significance lies partly in his enormous influence on Roman intellectuals of the age, including Cicero, Brutus and Varro, partly in his role as the harbinger of a …
The Invention of Infertility in the Classical Greek World
The article examines the understandings of, and responses to, reproductive failure in the classical Greek world. It discusses explanations and treatments for non-procreation in a range of ancient Greek medical texts, focusing on the writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, which devote considerable energy to matters of fertility and generation, and places them alongside the availability of a divine approach to dealing with reproductive disruption, the…
Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire by Ido Israelowich
Reviewed by: Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire by Ido Israelowich Rebecca Flemming Ido Israelowich. Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. viii + 191 pp. Ill. $59.95 (978-1-4214-1628-1). This book promises a more holistic and encompassing study of health care in the Roman Empire than has hitherto been provided in the scholarly literature. Rather than privileging the practitioner…
Patricia A. Baker, The Archaeology of Medicine in the Greco-Roman World
The material record has much to offer the study of ancient medicine, but, as Patricia Baker argues, it is, at present, an under-exploited and poorly understood resource. Hence this book: a brief, didactic introduction to the kinds of relevant archaeological evidence available, and to sufficient archaeological method to begin to make effective use of it, in order to facilitate and encourage the proper integration of material culture into the study…
Reproduction
Medicine and Markets in the Graeco-Roman World and Beyond
Fertility control in ancient Rome
This paper surveys and evaluates the range of methods recommended mostly to promote but also to prevent pregnancy in ancient Rome, and then discusses the practices of adult adoption and infant exposure in more detail in order to interrogate the notion of 'fertility control' from an ancient historical perspective. Is this formulation sufficiently flexible to encompass Roman procreative projects and the resources they were able to bring to bear on …
The Classical Clitoris
This article provides a global and focused survey of the rich surviving evidence for the classical Greek and Roman clitoris (or nymph). It starts with the surviving anatomical descriptions, with the clitoris in its healthy, according to nature condition, and explores the different attitudes and understandings that were articulated in this context. Then it moves to the clitoris contrary to nature, examining the pathologies delineated in the medica…
Biography, Women and Power
Julia Hillner's life of Helena, mother of Constantine, is the twentieth volume published in OUP's ‘Women in Antiquity’ series, launched in 2010 with Duane Roller's biography of Cleopatra. An earlier and overlapping series on the same theme — Routledge's ‘Women of the Ancient World’ — began in 2006 and adds a further half-dozen titles to the portfolio, from Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great by Elizbeth Carney to The Women of Pliny's Letters …
Pandemics in the Ancient Mediterranean World
This essay outlines the kinds of evidence available (and not available) for studies of ancient Mediterranean pandemics, the scholarship on the subject so far, and some reflections on the relationship between the two. The focus is on the three largescale epidemic episodes that have attracted the most scholarly attention: the "Plague of Athens" in the fifth century BCE; the "Antonine Plague," which spread across the Roman Empire in the late second …
History (16 works) · Art (13 works) · History (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Medicine (9 works) · Ancient history (7 works) · Classics (7 works) · Literature (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political science (6 works)