Event Date
This workshop will bring together several scholars of ancient science and medicine from across North America and the UK to discuss a manuscript draft of Colin Webster's new book, Organa and the Organism.
The intermingled histories of technology and the body do not start in the recent past but stretch back into the moment that the body emerged as an object of medical expertise in the fifth century BCE. In some ways this is obvious. Medicine is itself a type of technology or “techne,” and it involves therapeutic tools and substances. The history of medicine can therefore be written as the application of different technologies to the human fabric. Yet with each new set of medical tools, ideas about the human fabric change. Indeed, over the course of Classical antiquity, as technologies shifted, so too did notions about what type of object a body is, what substances constitute its essential nature and how its parts interact. Organa and the Organism follows these interwoven developments and takes the question of technology into the heart of Greek and Roman medicine from the Hippocratics in the fifth century BCE to Galen in the second century CE. It reveals when and how the body was first conceptualized as an “organism”—a functional object whose inner parts were tools [organa] that each completed certain vital tasks. It also examines the investigative technologies that helped medical theorists support new and shifting modes of corporeality. In so doing, it illustrates how different tools articulated different bodies. Overall, this book provides a broad survey of the ways that technologies impacted notions of corporeality and corporeal behaviors in Classical antiquity, while also tracking material details of ancient tools and how they informed assumptions about somatic structures, substances and processes. Organa and the Organism attends to the messy business of making the body within ancient medical explanations and how technologies were essential in this process at both a conceptual and material level.
Confirmed participants include Maria Gerolemou (Exeter), Daryn Lehoux (Queens), Sylvia Berryman (UBC), Claire Bubb (NYU). Participants can email cwebster@ucdavis.edu to receive the files and the Zoom link.