hawkwing_lb: (Garcia)
[personal profile] hawkwing_lb
"Towards an initial consideration of sickness and healing in Greek antiquity..."

This is where I go blank, you see.

I want to talk about the experience of illness, about how being sick narrows the world, and about how being in pain breaks down the idea of the self as a thing that possesses voice and agency. I want to talk about fear - of sickness, of death - and consciousness of mortality affects how sick humans relate to their immediate household and to healers. I want to understand how this affected ancient Greek attitudes towards healing gods and professional practitioners of medicine.

How there's this process of healing strategies, how people appealed to gods and doctors at the same time, and how healing sanctuaries and medical practitioners shared much of the same images of the healing process. And how, nonetheless, there's an element of tension, not just between healing sanctuaries/professional medicine and your local remedy-person or the guy who says his charms can bring down the moon, but between sanctuaries and doctors - the issue of cautery comes up.

Right now, I don't have the details. I don't even have the critical vocabulary to talk about this - I need to give myself a crash-course on Derrida and Foucault, culture as text and culture as inscribed in the body, if only so I can call them wrong wrong wrongity wrongheads problematic from an informed position. I don't think all postmodernist theory is pointless wank navel-gazing autoeroticism flawed.

I do hate it a lot, though.

But right now, I'm stuck on illness experience, conceptualising the actual experience of being sick in the Greek world. It's surprisingly difficult to access that domain, from the privilege of relative good health and modern medicine. When a chest cold is not expected to be life-threatening, whooping cough all but eradicated, tuberculosis of the spine a shocking rarity, consumption a thing more of our grandparents than ourselves, fever treatable with over-the-counter medications. So how do you conceive of that mortal threat, in antiquity? How did they? And how did they respond?

Those are the questions I really want to answer. And right now I'm still too ignorant.

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