Asking the Right Questions in Roman Public Health
"In order to illustrate the changing importance of Salus to the Roman government, and the variety of methods used in its interest, I synthesize three relatively well-worn subfields of Roman history that have so far remained discrete: first, the history of Roman hydraulic and sanitary engineering; second, Roman medical history, including especially the history of disease; and third, Roman political history."
“Curiosity Cures the Reb:’” Studying Talmudic Medical Discourses in Context
"A careful study of the discursive strategies and the embeddedness of such medical knowledge within their broader contexts of theology or religious law (Halakhah), allows one to highlight the differences in form and content in the variants of this narrative."
Ancient Medicine Forum | Medicine, Culture, and Self in Late Antiquity: A Gastronomic Reflection
"What is intriguing about such statements as cited above—and one can list many similar cases with other authors—is that in them we witness how health, physiology, and anatomy are structured by means of social and cultural discursive formations. In this case, the discourse of slavery, which I have termed doulology,[iv] structures the dynamics between mental and gastric health. By their extension into the realm of the material psychē, these dynamics, in turn, shape the self. You are how you eat."
Disability Studies and Rabbinic Resistance to the Roman Conquest of Jerusalem
"Rather than taking disability as a straightforward medical category, disability studies hones critical tools to analyze how societies construct and contest notions of normativity and deviance, illuminating the way disability becomes a site for negotiating stigma and social power. In rabbinic accounts of the destruction of Jerusalem, the disabled Jewish body serves both as a visceral occasion for lament and a potent site of protest against empire."
Medicine, Health Care Studies, and the Field of Late Antiquity
by Heidi Marx
"How did ancient scientists think about the ways plants fit into the larger cosmological order in relation to other ontological forms such as metals/minerals, animals, celestial beings, and other divinities? And how did these scientists think about the various kinds of transformative work plants did in the cosmos in contexts such as healing in medicine and refining in alchemical processes?"