Greco-Indian Medical Interactions

Online via Zoom.

The Hippocratic corpus, a group of early Greek medical texts from the fifth century BCE, include multiple treatise that record recipes and other instructions for making pharmaceuticals. Among these are purgatives and emmenagogues, eye ointments, and digestive aids. Most recipes include plants and other substances readily available within the Mediterranean. Yet, some recipes include pepper, Gangetic nard, and other substances that come from India. It is also around the fifth century BCE when Ayurvedic medicine seems to be formalized, notably in places along the Indian pepper trade routes, which are later developed more fully by the Ptolemies and Romans. There are many similarities between Greek medical and Ayurvedic medicines, including their respective humoral frameworks for disease and their allopathic treatments, but there are very few concrete indications of influence. This talk explores connections between these two medical systems by examining the movement of pharmaka between India and the Mediterranean, illustrating the threads of interaction established by plants, resins, traders, envoys, and empires.

Colin A Webster is a historian and philosopher of science, technology and medicine, with an interest in Greek and Roman studies, as well as the ancient world more broadly. His research has uncovered how technologies impacted scientific theories, especially in medical conceptions of the organism. Recent projects include investigations in the history of optics, astronomy, Roman cognition enhancing drugs, and the early history of dissection.