Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West: a History in Documents

“We finally have a sorely needed volume of primary sources that illustrates the breadth, depth, vibrancy, and development of premodern medical thinking. Winston Black has assembled a remarkable collection of key texts and provided clear and concise introductions that contextualize the sources and highlight their significance. Unfamiliar terms and references are conveniently explained in the margins, making the already clear translations even more readable. Any course that addresses premodern health or healing will find this coherent, expertly curated, and accessible set of sources absolutely essential.” – Frederick Gibbs, University of New Mexico

“Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of primary-source collections dealing with the history of science and medicine. Providing an eclectic range of numerous documents from the earliest civilizations in the Mediterranean basin through the central Middle Ages, the book can serve as a general grounding in the subject, as a supplemental text for survey courses, or as a source for further individualized research. The source texts–many of which are translated into English for the first time–come prefaced with helpful thematic overviews, and each text receives its own introduction. Medicine and Healing presents a nuanced yet manageable selection of sources; students will find it eminently fascinating.” – Christine Senecal, Shippensburg University

“Winston Black has chosen an intriguing array of primary sources on themes such as religious healing, ancient Egyptian medicine, the Islamicate world, surgery, women’s medicine, and charms and magical medicine. Clear headnotes, careful definitions of technical or unfamiliar terms, and topic overviews will help undergraduates and new graduate students alike. Teaching early medicine just got easier!” – Mary Fissell, Johns Hopkins University

“In Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West: A History in Documents, Black draws on his strengths as a historian of medicine and religion to provide a concise and accessible treatment of the development of the medical arts from Antiquity to the Late Medieval Period. … As it is meant as an introduction to the topic, Medicine and Healing in the Premodern West does not stray from its path and for this reason it is a welcome exemplar of what can be achieved in future contributions of introductory works on the history of science and medicine.” – Michael Lawson University of California-Berkeley, Journal of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science