Re-orienting Ancient Medicine Courses

The image shows two pages from the Dioscorides treatise on pharmacology, with Greek text on left and Arabic on the right. In between is a cuneiform table.

Event Date

Location
Zoom

Re-orienting Ancient Medicine Courses

Aileen Das (University of Michigan) and Jay Crisostomo (University of Michigan)

This pedagogy workshop is aimed at (past, current, and would-be) instructors of ancient medicine, science, and technology courses who would be keen to integrate material from the pre-modern Middle East. Popular and more academic narratives often equate ancient medicine with Greco-Roman medicine and frame its study as an originist history of a monolithic western medical tradition. When these narratives introduce content from the pre-modern Middle East, such as from Assyria or the medieval Islamicate world, they define the contribution of Middle Eastern knowledge-makers in terms of their anticipation or preservation of a western science. This workshop will discuss ways of foregrounding the theories and actors of pre-modern Middle Eastern science, technology, and medicine without rendering them subservient to a hegemonic "western tradition". Moreover, we will review a range of primary and secondary source materials that we utilize in our own teaching of these subjects.

Contact cwebster@ucdavis.edu to receive the Zoom link or fill out the form here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1H0P6oxelCWvmq1A_nrCfF__B-16PRyb-N7PAbrFPSqc/edit

For more information please contact Colin Webster (cwebster@ucdavis.edu)

Event sponsored by DHI Early Science Workshop and the Society for Ancient Medicine

Event Category