In a recent exhibit at the New York Academy of Medicine, I examined the evolution ofteratology (i.e., the study of perceived abnormalities in the natural world, both real and imagined) through the eyes of physicians and philosophers. Based on the exhibit, this paper describes the major interpretations of teratology from Antiquity to the end of the eighteenth century. The term "monster," which i...

Baker’s asthma is one of the most common forms of occupational asthma. The increasing knowledge in exposure–response relations accumulated in recent years is important in the understanding of baker’s asthma. This development has made scientifically based prevention feasible today and baker’s asthma should not be regarded as an inevitable occurrence any more. In 1700 Bernardo Ramazzini described...

Many Greek and Latin medical terms are in use on account of the fact that modern day Western conventional medicine originates in Greek and Roman antiquity. The writings of Hippocrates and Galen, as well as of Celsus and Plinius, remain the principal source of the constituent elements of medical terminology and the base for the correctness of Western scientific onomatology. However, the number o...

The author reviews the development of the idea of scientific progress from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the Middle Ages and shows that from Xenophanes (6th century BC) on, the notion of progress can be found in the works of many authors, including physicians, throughout the centuries. Even if at first the concept was often rather inchoate and limited to what we would call technology, in the Middle...

The region of Campania exerted a powerful influence over the Roman cultural imagination. the volcanic landscape around the Bay of naples was blessed with immense natural beauty and abundance but also harbored some of nature’s most violent forces. in this suitably monumental setting, mythological heroes such as Heracles and aeneas were said to have performed famous deeds. campania was, moreover,...

Cases of sexual reassignment in Greco-Roman antiquity, presenting as a pubertal female to male gender transformation, are described in the "classical"literature. Textual evidence concerning a case of androgynism, garnered by Diodorus Siculus, among other similar accounts, as an odd story of gender dispute in a court of justice, is provided in the present study. A medical interpretation of the d...

This short paper studies a set of ten silver instruments belonging to the New Milton Collection, which are believed to be dental and of Roman date. A brief history of the set is given, also a description of each instrument together with suggested name and function, based upon the accounts of dental procedures recorded in classical medical texts. In an attempt to determine the antiquity of the s...

Plato uses the idea of divinatory knowledge as a metaphorical descriptor for a variety of kinds of daytime, waking knowing. What unites these examples is that they all include discussion of a kind of knowing that cannot account for itself, and that is tentative, imagistic and non-discursive. These metaphorical uses can further be illuminated by his more detailed discussion of divinatory knowled...