Ancient Medicine and Philosophy

What were the ancient and medieval conceptions of health and disease? How can medical thinking be understood in its broader philosophical, religious, and ethical context?

Rather than treating medicine as a purely technical discipline, the contributions of this edited volume emphasize its deep entanglement with ideas of the good life, the soul, and social order. Drawing on papers from two international conferences, the volume covers a wide chronological and thematic range: from the cult of Asclepius and the interaction between ritual healing and empirical practice, to the intellectual exchange between Sophistic philosophy and Hippocratic medicine. Further chapters address Platonic music therapy, Cynic social critique, the ethical role of emotions in Plutarch, responses to the Antonine Plague, Galen’s medicalization of moral virtue, gnostic paths to happiness, Byzantine gynecology, dietetics, and the transmission of medical knowledge into the Renaissance. Taken together, the volume presents ancient medicine as a pluralistic and dynamic field in which bodily health, moral formation, emotional balance, and cosmic order are inseparably linked, offering a holistic understanding of health that continues to inform modern perspectives.