Search results for "Ancient Greek medicine"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Quando la malattia nasce, cresce e muore «con» (συν-) il paziente. Terminologia del male congenito nel Corpus ippocratico
2019
The present study aims to investigate the use and semantics of the most common terminology used by the medical writers of the Hippocratic Collection in order to define diseases commonly considered to be of a “congenital” nature, with particular attention to nominal as well as verbal forms, composed by the prefixation syn-, indicating the different stages of the pathological process according to which disease is represented as a proper entity claimed to arise inside the patient, to develop, to became old and then also to die together with him or her. Individual constitution, familiarity, epigenetic factors such as conditions of growth during gestation or climatic conditions, age of the patie…
The words of conjecture. Semiotics and epistemology in ancient medicine and rhetoric
2016
This article considers the epistemology of Classical rhetoric and Hippocratic medicine, focusing on two key terms: semeion and tekmerion. Through an analysis of the specific case of ancient Greek medicine and rhetoric, we hope to bring out the conjectural and fallible nature of human knowledge. The paper focuses on the epistemological and methodological affinity between these two ancient technai, and considers the medical uses of semeion and tekmerion in the light of their meaning in the rhetorical sphere. Chronologically, the analysis follows an inverse pathway: it starts from Aristotle and from Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, and then moves on to Antiphon’s texts (chosen as an exemplary case) an…
Polisemia di nòmos e l'esordio di Hipp. de genitura
2016
Far from being, as has been said, “the bizarrest beginning of all the Hippocratic writings (...) deserving of therapy”, this paper aims to show that the opening words of the Hippocratic writing “On Generation” (νόμοϲ μὲν πάντα κρατύνει), in itself echoing a famous Pindaric motto, seem to be used first of all in order to evoke a cultural, intellectual and scientific world, in which the nòmos has become one of the most important keywords of the time. From this point of view, the Pindaric quotation seems to be played out on the wide semantic range of nòmos as well as on the ambiguous meaning of the verb κρατύνω, which in this embryological context denote specifically the consolidation and hard…