Lecture Information:

Time: May 22, 2024 (Wednesday) 18:40 (Beijing Time)

Venue： Room 620, Yifu Teaching Building (https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/ScTcGbQC4eq2)

Speaker:  Professor Laurence Totelin (Cardiff University)

Moderator: Dr. Yang Shuya (School of Health Humanities, Peking University)

Panelist: Professor Zhang Daqing (School of Health Humanities, Peking University)

               Associate Professor Su Jingjing (School of Health Humanities, Peking University)

Lecture Title: Pharmacological Consumers in the Greek and Roman Worlds

Abstract:

Preparing remedies was an important aspect of the work of ancient physicians and other healers in the Greek and Roman worlds. These physicians wrote long treatises on the topic of drug preparation, where they complained about other people who prepared remedies of poor quality. But what about the consumers of these medicines?  What do we know about them?  This is the topic of this lecture.  Our main source for our knowledge of them are again the treatises written by ancient physicians, although we also have some references in other documents.  We have a lot of information about royal figures' consumption of medicine, but our knowledge of how 'normal people' bought and consumed remedies is more limited. Ancient medical writers classified these consumers into 'hard' and 'soft' consumers.  These categories overlapped to an extent with social classes, but also had gender and age-related dimensions.  I will suggest that, by reading the material through these categories, we might be able to discern an ancient discourse about the ambivalent nature of choice in drug consumption.