The comparable body : : analogy and metaphor in ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine / / edited by John Z. Wee.

• Superior document: Studies in Ancient Medicine, Volume 49
• TeilnehmendeR: Wee, John Z.,
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, The Netherlands ;, Boston, [Massachusetts] : : Brill,, 2017.; ©2017
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in ancient medicine ; Volume 49.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (457 pages) :; illustrations (some color).

The Comparable Body - Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman Medicine explores how analogy and metaphor illuminate and shape conceptions about the human body and disease, through 11 case studies from ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greco-Roman medicine. Topics address the role of analogy and metaphor as features of medical culture and theory, while questioning their naturalness and inevitability, their limits, their situation between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and complexities in their portrayal as a mutually intelligible medium for communication and consensus among users.

Table of Contents

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Acknowledgements -- List of Figures and Tables -- Abbreviations -- Transliteration Notes -- Periodization of Ancient Mesopotamia -- Contributors -- Introduction: To What May I Liken Metaphor? / John Z. Wee -- Analogy and Metaphor in Ancient Medicine and the Ancient Egyptian Conceptualisation of Heat in the Body* / Rune Nyord -- From Head to Toe: Listing the Body in Cuneiform Texts / M. Erica Couto-Ferreira -- The Stuff of Causation: Etiological Metaphor and Pathogenic Channeling in Babylonian Medicine1 / J. Cale Johnson -- Aristotle’s Heart and the Heartless Man / Lesley Dean-Jones -- Earthquake and Epilepsy: The Body Geologic in the Hippocratic Treatise On the Sacred Disease / John Z. Wee -- The Lineage of “Bloodlines”: Synecdoche, Metonymy, Medicine, and More / Paul T. Keyser -- Eye Metaphors, Analogies and Similes within Mesopotamian Magico-Medical Texts* / Strahil V. Panayotov -- The Experience and Description of Pain in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi / Janet Downie -- Concepts of the Female Body in Mesopotamian Gynecological Texts / Ulrike Steinert -- Pure Life: The Limits of the Vegetal Analogy in the Hippocratics and Galen / Brooke Holmes -- Animal, Vegetable, Metaphor: Plotinus’s Liver and the Roots of Biological Identity / Courtney Ann Roby.