The Art Is Long

The fifth-century BC medical text On the Sacred Disease is often used in positivist accounts of the origins of modern medicine. In this elegant and readable analysis, Julie Laskaris submits that the text demonstrates not the first stage of the triumph of scientific thought, but the enduring strength of other ways of healing dating back to the Bronze Age. In a tightly argued introduction, drawing in particular on the work of Karl Popper, she examines what we mean by "science" and suggests that this treatise is "scientific," not in terms of its methods and goals, but because it offers a critical challenge to earlier theories: it uses observation not to generate, but to test, theory. A chapter on medicine in Greece before the fifth century sets the context within which the author of On the Sacred Disease was writing, and uses archaeological evidence to explore knowledge of medicinal plants and the role of writing in transmitting medical knowledge. Drawing on Rosalind Thomas's work on orality and literacy, Laskaris discusses the role of specific cultural contexts in determining whether writing is used to fossilize knowledge, or to facilitate criticism and debate. Further chapters examine the history of scholarship on this text, noting its lack of impact on ancient medicine, and analyze it in terms of its rhetorical and sophistic features

Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology) · Criticism · Epistemology · Literacy · Literature · Orality · Political science · Positivism · Rhetorical question · Scholarship · Sociology · Sociology of scientific knowledge · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Law · Philosophy