Book Details

Using the evidence not just from Greek medical theory and practice, but also from epic, lyric, tragedy, historiography, philosophy and religion, In the Grip of Disease offers for the first time an overview of the influence of Greek thought about disease on the Greek imagination. Particular attention is paid to accounts of real and imaginary plagues (the Iliad, Oedipus Tyrannus, Hippocratic writers, Thucydides, Lucretius), to the concurrent development of Hippocratic and temple medicine (cults of Asclepius and others), to the diagnosis of madness (Herodotus, the Bacchae), and to the rhetoric of the disease of the body politic and how it should be treated. The final chapter explores similarities and contrasts between Greek thought and modern views on such topics as madness, criminality and creativity.