Introduction

The scholarly medical traditions of the Mediterranean, the Near East and Asia investigated in this book, though belonging to different historical periods, have something in common: they are all based on textual practices or literacy as technology. The cross-cultural variability of disease concepts and illness experiences emphasized in medical anthropology has important implications for the debate concerning the applicability of retrospective diagnoses, which has been ongoing in the history of medicine, and also in recent years in Assyriology and Egyptology. Bridging methodological issues relevant to anthropologists and historians of medicine alike, Elisabeth Hsu argues that the experiential basis of medical concepts mediates the biological and the cultural. Both historians and social/cultural anthropologists working on classification across cultures and historical periods confirm that classification is a situated process which can be flexible and context-dependent. The present volume provides several case studies focusing primarily on specialist knowledge and written discourses on sickness in its multiple forms, manifestations and causes.