Byzantine Medical Manuals: Construction and Use

Investigator(s): Professor Peregrine Horden, Dr. Barbara Zipser
Affiliated Students: ---
Funding Source(s): Wellcome Trust
Funding Amount: £129,203
Start Date: May 2007
End Date: April 2010
Related Publications

The project is a study in Byzantine medical texts. The Byzantine empire had a vigorous and long-lived medical culture that deserves study in its own right, not just because it was the conduit of ancient medicine to medieval Islam and Europe. Yet very little is known about it. Just a fraction of the over 2,000 Greek medical manuscripts that survive have been properly catalogued and analysed, and this is partly because of their chaotic appearance. However, since they were mostly texts intended to be used, there must have been some principles of construction that would enable the reader to find what he required. The project will seek to uncover those patterns of organisation and show how the texts could have been deployed in a variety of historical settings, educational and therapeutic.

On Saturday, 19th September a number of international scholars gathered at 2 Gower Street to discuss "Byzantine Medical Manuals in Context", at a conference sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and the History Department of Royal Holloway University of London.

The eight presentations focused on topics such as the cultural exchange between Byzantium and the Arabic world in 12th and 13th century, the reception of Byzantine medicine in the early modern period and the centres of medical book production in the Greek middle ages. A full programme can be found here. One of the papers was presented by a scientist.

We also visited the Wellcome Library to view four medical manuscripts; three of the manuscripts contained a Latin, Greek or Arabic version of the Capsula Eburnea, the fourth a Syriac-Greek dictionary with Turkish roots.

The conference was hosted by the History Department and jointly organized by Peregrine Horden and Barbara Zipser. It was part of a Wellcome Trust funded research project on Byzantine medical manuals.

It was a very stimulating meeting, bringing together delegates from the major research centers working in the field, such as the Teuchos Institute, in Hamburg, and the MIET in Athens. A total of 31 scholars from six countries and 22 institutions attended the conference.