Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures puts historical disease concepts in cross-cultural perspective, investigating perceptions, constructions and experiences of health and illness from antiquity to the seventeenth century. Focusing on the systematisation and classification of illness in its multiple forms, manifestations and causes, this volume examines case studies ranging from popular concepts of illness through to specialist discourses on it. Using philological, historical and anthropological approaches, the contributions cover perspectives across time from East Asian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, spanning ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome to Tibet and China. They aim to capture the multiplicity of disease concepts and medical traditions within specific societies, and to investigate the historical dynamics of stability and change linked to such concepts. Providing useful material for comparative research, the volume is a key resource for researchers studying the cultural conceptualisation of illness, including anthropologists, historians and classicists, among others.

Vol. 12 (from May 1876 to May 1877) includes: Researches in telephony / by A. Graham Bell.

This text takes a set of central topics from ancient Greek medicine and biology - relating especially to beliefs about animals, women and drugs - and studies first the interaction between scientific theorising and folklore, and second the ideological character of ancient scientific inquiry. Within this framework the author looks at the development of zoological taxonomy, the repercussions of prevailing Greek assumptions concerning the inferiority of the female sex on medical practice, pharmacology and anatomy. Anthropology is used to provide a comparative dimension to the discussion of ancent Greek popular beliefs.