Conveners
S.4.4. Medicine, Morality, and the Supernatural: Cultural Narratives of Health in Premodern Societies
- Salome Gviniashvili (Tusheti Protected Landscape)
- Elisa Ramazzina (University of Insubria)
- Dávid Molnár (University of Tokaj)
Description
Chair: Vladimír Urbánek
In 1538, Simone Gazio dedicated a short treatise on beer and wine to Franciscus Thurzo, a work that survives in an Augsburg edition from 1546. According to Gazio, he discovered the manuscript among the papers of his late father, Antonio Gazio (1461-1528). The main text resembles a medical indictment, establishing health-related "facts" about wine and beer. It evokes a courtroom trial - or...
Georgian folk medicine, deeply rooted in both Christian traditions and pre-Christian beliefs, preserved healing practices that combined herbal remedies with magical rituals, protective spells, and sacred objects. This paper examines the role of religious invocations, amulets, and symbolic actions in healing, as documented in medieval Georgian carabadinis (medical books) and ethnographic...
This paper examines the linguistic and rhetorical strategies in early modern English medical texts to conceptualise old age, vitality, and life prolongation. Focusing on 16th- to 18th-century works, including reprints of Bacon's The Cure of Old Age, Quersitanus's Practise of Chymicall Physicke, Sennert's Nine Books of Physick, and Salmon's Ars Chirurgica, it explores how aging was...
