Phrenitis .

is ubiquitous in ancient medicine and philosophy. Galen mentions the disease innumerable times, Patristic authors take it as a favourite allegory of human flaws, and no ancient doctor fails to diagnose it and attempt its cure. Yet the nature of this once famous disease has not been properly understood by scholars.

Therapy of the word and other psychotherapeutic approaches in Ancient Greek medicine.

One of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary psychiatry is its firm grounding in a neurological and biochemical framework for the interpretation of mental life and its disturbances. In the absence of any strong neurological understanding or systematic knowledge of active pharmaceutical substances, one might expect that early ancient medicine readily resorted to non-somatic approaches to healing mental suffering. Instead, what is usually labelled "therapy of the word" and other forms of what one may call psychotherapy emerge relatively late in Greek medicine, only in the first centuries of our era.

A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought.

This book on ancient medicine offers a unique resource for historians of medicine, historians of psychology, and classicists - and also cultural historians and historians of art. The Hippocratic texts and other contemporary medical sources have often been overlooked when it comes to their approaches to psychology, which are considered more mechanical and less elaborated than contemporary poetic and philosophical representations, but also than later medical works, notably Galenic. This book aims to do justice to early medical accounts by illustrating their richness and sophistication, their links with contemporary cultural products, and the indebtedness of later medicine to their observations.

Patient Function and Physician Function in the Hippocratic Cases.

This chapter looks at the patient cases of the Epidemics as testimonies to the interaction between the physician and the patient. My corpus of reference is the patient cases in fifth- and early fourth-century medical texts, mostly the more elaborated examples offered by Epidemics 1 and 3. A patient case collects information from various sources: the patient's observable behavior and state; his or her account of her disease, its history and the patient's lifestyle; the contribution given by relatives and friends; and, of course, the physician with his judgment, his agenda, his terminology and didactic aims.