This project focuses on a key, but comparatively underrated aspect of ancient medicine and anatomy: the gastric area of the body and the process of food ingestion and assimilation. Other functions and vital processes have attracted more attention in historiographies of medicine, such as the role of the brain in cognition, cardiocentric models in competition with encephalocentrism, blood circulation, the humours and respiration. Despite its well-known importance and involvement in a variety of aspects of animated life, the gastric sphere, instead, has not been a central topic. My aim is to redress this balance, exploring the topic from the most concrete and material – the construction of different bodily anatomies and physiological models; the pragmatic, social and economic aspects of human food intake – to the most abstract – psychological and cultural, even metaphorical ‘guts’.
This topic is innovative in a number of ways. First, it focuses on an aspect of the human body and its physiology that are seldom addressed, despite its obvious centrality. Secondly, it combines the philology of ancient texts, history of medicine, and material and cultural history in a broader sense, while including considerations of current neuroscientific suggestions to bring ancient theories in dialogue with modern views about the body. Thirdly, it explicitly joins medical models and non-technical perceptions and metaphors of the body and finally, it aims to bring together the history of ancient doctrines about the body and the concrete, material history of ancient life in one of its most basic aspects, the consumption of food and drink and its processes. Thus, this study intends to further a dialogue between different areas of history, while strongly affirming the relevance of ancient texts to contemporary questions.

Thus, this study intends to further a dialogue between different areas of history, while strongly affirming the relevance of ancient texts to contemporary questions.

--------------------------------------
Project by Chiara Thumiger cthumiger@roots.uni-kiel.de

Personal webpage link