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What happens when we juxtapose medicine and law in the ancient Roman world? This book shows how both fields were crafted to fulfil peculiarly ancient needs and desires, becoming forms of public entertainment and allowing practitioners to display their education in rhetoric.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations and Cited Editions of the Galenic Corpus Used in the Volume
- Introduction: Setting Medicine and the Law Apart, Together
- I: Selling the Subject-Matter: When Science, Competition, and Entertainment Commingle
- 1: Matthew Roller: Introduction: Competition in the Roman Empire--Structure, Characteristics, and New Arenas
- 2: Anna Dolganov: Law as Competitive Performance: Performative Aspects of the Legal Process in Roman Imperial Courts
- 3: Luis Alejandro Salas: Medicine as Competitive Performance: Eristic and Erudition--Galen on Erasistratus and the Arteries
- 4: Kendra Eshleman: Response: Does the Performance Undercut the Substance?
- II: Over-Shooting the Subject-Matter: When Pragmatism and Expertise Collide
- 5: Alice König and Michael Peachin: Introduction: What Makes the Specialized Expert, and his Expertise?
- 6: Bruce Frier: Juristic Literature and the Law: Competition and Cooperation
- 7: Claire Bubb: Medical Literature and Medicine: Going Beyond the Practical
- 8: James Uden: Response: Expert or Intellectual? Other Views on Legal and Medical Expertise
- III: Positioning the Subject-Matter: When Rhetoric and Science Converge
- 9: Ulrike Babusiaux and Claire Bubb: Introduction: The Ubiquity of Rhetoric
- 10: Ulrike Babusiaux: Rhetoric in Legal Writing: The Ethos and the Pathos of Roman Jurists
- 11: Caroline Petit: Rhetoric in Medical Writing: Artistic Prose?
- 12: Claire Bubb and Joseph Howley: Response: Experts of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Expertise
- Conclusion: How does Philosophy Compare?
- Index
About the author
Claire Bubb received her BA in Greek and Latin from Brown University and her PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Classical Literature and Science at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
Michael Peachin earned his PhD in Ancient History from Columbia University, and came to the Department of Classics at NYU in 1983. As of September 2022, he is Professor Emeritus.
Summary
What happens when we juxtapose medicine and law in the ancient Roman world? This book shows how both fields were crafted to fulfil peculiarly ancient needs and desires, becoming forms of public entertainment and allowing practitioners to display their education in rhetoric.
Additional text
The book is a pleasure to read, and the contributors do an excellent job of engaging with each other's arguments. This cohesiveness of the volume is one of its greatest assets, with the responses that follow the case studies helpfully synthesizing and asking further questions. While the essays are primarily suitable for advanced students and scholars, selections could be brought into an undergraduate course on Roman law or medicine. In the fascinating questions raised, and often answered, by the contributors to this collection, the reader will find new openings for future research on law and medicine and their commonalities.
