(no subject)

[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.

Comments

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

it sounds to me like you are asking really good questions, at least. I wish you luck! (and hope for lots of updates, it sounds frustrating to do but the results sound like they will be very interesting.)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

She beat me to it! Yes.

When you start with Derrida and Foucault, please remember that they weren't writing for normal humans. If you read a passage three times and still don't have any idea what they're on about, the fault is not with you.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

A friend of my acquaintance whose vivas (for a PhD in English children's lit, specifically landscape and Susan Cooper's "Dark is Rising" sequence) are coming up has promised me a brief "Idiot's Guide" to the Great Postmodernist Thinkers.

Which I most devoutly hope for, because seriously, those guys? Don't even get me started. (Some kind of alien species, is my conclusion from the excerpts I've encountered thus far.)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I think it's more likely to have been severe craniorectal inversion. But space aliens aren't impossible.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I applaud your diagnosis. On the other hand, they display all the symptoms of a critical case of such a syndrome, and yet! still managed to live long lives and use a typewriter. So I should like to combine both our theories, and create a grand theory that explains everything. :P

[txanne.livejournal.com]

What do you think they had assistants for, if not to type? I think some of the more incomprehensible bits were actually belly-rumblings, faithfully transcribed by their minions.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

Okay, that's brilliant. To where should I deliver your internets?

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Oh, here's fine. \o/

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

*sticks a bow on top*

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

One might hope for results, at least. Interest? I guess that'll depend on whether I really am as good as I hope I am. :P

[atheilen.livejournal.com]

I am interested.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

I would like to think the answers to my questions will continue to interest you. :)

[clarentine]

I'm intrigued by the concept of being outside the normal range of society, and that's what serious illness does to a person, yes? And I'm open to learning how best to communicate the difference in mindset between then and now, as much of what I write is set some time back. So, yes, I'm interested.

(And is it just me, or is it awfully hard sometimes to return to "normal" vision of the world once one's adjusted one's vision to a different viewpoint?)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

(Define "normal" and I might be able to answer that question. :P )

Your first question is one of the questions I want to answer, actually. What is the position of illness - actual, physical sickness, for the Greeks used the vocabulary of disease to talk about the state, madness, and love, to name a few - in ancient society? How does this affect healing strategies? How unwell is it normal to be - Seneca in his Moral Letters talks about his asthma, which he thinks is good training for a philosopher to learn not to fear death, but is he an outlier?

I'm not sure how many of these questions I'll be able to address in my research, but the possibilities are bloody fascinating.