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Explores how the introduction of timekeeping technologies -- sundials and water clocks -- affected the practice, rhetoric, and theory of ancient medicine; and, conversely, how medical timekeeping practices affected engagement with time elsewhere in society, drawing on literary and material evidence from ancient Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, and Egypt.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Telling Time in the Greco-Roman World
- 2: Doctors and Clocks: The Emergence of Hourly Timekeeping in Medical Contexts
- 3: Clocks as Symbols 1: In Galen's Thought
- 4: Clocks as Symbols 2: Among the Roman Elite
- 5: From "Season" to "Hour": Galenic Refinements of the Hippocratic Hora
- 6: When is Temporal Exactitude Desirable?
- 7: "Right Timing" in Sickness and in Health: Hourly Timekeeping and Kairos in Galen's On Hygiene
- Conclusion: From Antiquity to Modernity
About the author
Kassandra J. Miller earned her PhD in Classics at the University of Chicago. She has been an Assistant Professor of Classics at Colby College since 2020, and previously taught in Classics departments at Bard College and Union College. She co-edited and contributed to the volume Down to the Hour: Short Time in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East (2020) and has published articles and book chapters on Greco-Roman timekeeping, medicine, magic, and mythology.
Summary
Explores how the introduction of timekeeping technologies -- sundials and water clocks -- affected the practice, rhetoric, and theory of ancient medicine; and, conversely, how medical timekeeping practices affected engagement with time elsewhere in society, drawing on literary and material evidence from ancient Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, and Egypt.
Additional text
Miller has given us a well written, lucid, and erudite synthesis of the topic, and I am certain that this stimulating book will find many admirers.
