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Special Topic: Medicine and Society in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages - 20 credits (HST039)

As anyone would expect, ancient medical texts inform us about illnesses and diseases, treatments, and relations between patients and physicians in the ancient world. However, studying medical texts should not be the preserve of medical historians; anyone interested in social, economic and intellectual history should find something that is relevant in medical literature. In this module, students learn how to analyse and interpret ancient medical texts and artefacts by using a variety of approaches and methods, such as discourse theory, biographies of objects, history of the book, and gender history. The module consists of in-depth study of an ancient medical source or corpus of sources.