Diseases in the Ancient Greek World

What were the illnesses that plagued men, women, and children of the ancient world? Traditional approaches to this subject have often relied exclusively on literary evidence, but ancient texts are extraordinarily difficult to interpret. Different methodologies, archaic defitions of diseases, and technical terms whose meanings have shifted over time frustrate discovery of the actual diseases hidden behind textual sources.

To uncover this ＂nosological reality,＂ Mirko D. Grmek has fashioned a vast army of techniques into a new, multidisciplinary approach that combines philology, paleopathology, paleodemography, and iconography with recent developments in genetics, immunology, epidemiology, and clinical medicine. Also new is Grmek’s concept of pathocoenosis (the ensemble of pathological states present in a given population) and his method of examining such ancient diseases as leprocy, tuberculosis, and syphilis in relation to one another, and to all other pathological conditions, rather than in isolation.

Mirko D. Grmek is Director of Studies at L’Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne. From 1981 to 1985 he served as president of the International Academy of the History of Science. The author of books in three languages, he has published extensively in the field of the epistemology and history of medicine and life sciences.