Event

Phrenitis is one of the most prominent mental diseases (with our explicit categorisation) in ancient medicine, and a disease label that will survive, through varying anatomic localizations and etiologies, through to the psychiatry of the nineteenth century. One of the aspects of its ‚robustness‘ – its ability to persist through time - is its relationship with a key topic in ancient medicine and philosophy, that of the localization of the mental faculties. In this paper I shall introduce the disease and its most common manifestations in ancient medicine, and then move to the topic of its localization between chest and head and the debates it engendered in ancient science. To conclude, I shall offer some observations about the technical status of this disease in ancient discourses, and make a hypothesis towards explaining the long life of phrenitis as diagnosed disease in our medical tradition.

Chiara Thumiger is a classicist and historian of ancient science. On the medical side of her research, her interests lie in the area of history of psychiatry and history of the representations of, and ideas about the body and mental health. As a classicist, she has worked on Greek tragedy, ancient views about the self and literary characterization, and ancient animals. She has a strong commitment to bringing these two areas of study, the literary and the cultural-historical in close dialogue with one another. She is the author of  A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought, Cambridge University Press 2017, and has recently edited Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine. From Celsus to Paul of Aegina (co-edited with P. Singer), Brill, 2018.

Currently, she is working on a monograph about the ancient disease phrenitis and its afterlife in the Western medical tradition, and completing a volume on the topic of ‘holism’, ‘connectionism’ and ‘localisation’ in ancient medicine and its reception (Ancient Holisms. Contexts, Forms and Heritage).