This course examines the Greek, Arabic, and Persian traditions of medicine in order to better understand 1) the historical roots of Western medical thought, and 2) how these interrelated traditions still influence assumptions about health and the body throughout the Middle East and the Mediterranean in the 21^st century. Questions will focus on how these traditions came to define (and redefine) such concepts as health, body, reproduction, bodily substance, gender, and the overall nature of human beings. For this reason, we will survey major texts from the canon of medicinal philosophy—from Hippocrates and Aristotle in Greek antiquity to Avicenna and Razi in the rise of Islam in the Middle Ages—but also contemporary cases taken from ethnography and other modern cultural accounts. Finally, we will compare the Greco-Arabic paradigm(s) of medicine to those we encounter in ethnographic case-studies from such places as China, America, Amazonia, Indonesia, and India, among others.

We will cover as much content as possible in a brief number of meetings, but lectures and seminars are directed less on the specifics of history and more toward the development of cultural models. The course is designed with BOTH anthropology and non-anthropology students in mind. As an anthropological course, students will practice the skills necessary for surveying primary textual/cultural sources, developing and arguing interpretations, and evaluating interpretive models through the comparative method.