Medical traditions encapsulate the knowledge of life, health, nutrition, diseases and their treatment patiently assembled by populations over a long period of time in the past, carefully handed down through generations, and subsequently recorded in writing and preserved in books now scattered in libraries across the world. Rarely the object of a specific study, they are approached here as a field in its own right. The present essay explores such key topics as the impact of tradition approach on medical historiography, the relation between written documents and practice, and the transmission...

This book is a study of three iatrosofia (the notebooks of traditional healers) from the Ottoman and modern periods of Greece. The main text is a collection of the medical recipes of the monk Gymnasios Lauriōtis (b. 1858). Gymnasios had a working knowledge of over 2,000 plants and their use in medical treatments. Two earlier iatrosofia are used for parallels for Gymnasios’s recipes. One was written c. 1800 by a practical doctor near Khania, Crete, and illustrated by a second hand. The second iatrosofion dates to the sixteenth century; ascribed to a Meletios, the text survives in the Codex...

The title of the project reflects an overarching methodology of trans-disciplinarity, which consists in injecting the concepts and methods of a discipline into another, as well as searching for trans-chronological and trans-geographic connections. The 93 essays range across traditionally defined disciplines and historical periods in medicine and science, and across countries all over the world. The papers discuss venoms and poisons to medicinal plants, the Byzantine manuscripts of botanico-medical texts, codicology and the art of textual editing, pharmacy, ethnobotany and ethnopharmacy,...

The title of the project reflects an overarching methodology of trans-disciplinarity, which consists in injecting the concepts and methods of a discipline into another, as well as searching for trans-chronological and trans-geographic connections. The 93 essays range across traditionally defined disciplines and historical periods in medicine and science, and across countries all over the world. The papers discuss venoms and poisons to medicinal plants, the Byzantine manuscripts of botanico-medical texts, codicology and the art of textual editing, pharmacy, ethnobotany and ethnopharmacy,...