“Scholasticism and Technical Writing in Late Babylonian Medical Education”

John Wee (University of Chicago)

Medical commentaries from ancient Iraq (c. 4th century BCE) were copied by intermediate students already familiar with therapeutic prescriptions, who were learning about bodily conditions and behaviors from a Diagnostic Handbook. Teachers explained difficult terminology and concepts by harmonizing them with alleged parallels from authoritative writings on literature, astronomy, divination, religion, and lexicography. Complex yet predictable patterns of textual hermeneutics were repeatedly used, implying that the results accrued from closely following a method. To the modern reader, these techniques appear to be contrived, the logic circuitous, and the inclusion of non-medical content superfluous and akin to prooftexting. The notion that healers should be knowledgeable in diverse fields and universal ways of reasoning, moreover, bears some resemblance to scholastic medicine in medieval Europe, where university doctors cited their book-learning as evidence of true insight into causes that eluded empirics with only on-the-job training. It is easy to dismiss scholastic practices, with their reliance on canonical authority and text-based ways of reasoning, as antithetical to sense experience and empirical evidence that we value in science today. Disregarding the erudite arguments and proofs constituting the bulk of our Iraq commentaries, however, we discover that they inevitably arrive at the same answers derivable in straightforward manner from therapeutic prescriptions, though the latter were never explicitly acknowledged. The trappings of scholasticism served to fashion medicine as a technē with broad philosophical and theoretical underpinnings, but did not, in fact, alter the ways healers described and categorized the sick body based on experiences in therapeutic practice.

“Teaching Clinical Judgment: Methodist and Galenic Approaches”

Katherine van Schaik (Harvard University)

This paper asks two questions of two different schools of medical thought (Methodism and Galenism) that rose to prominence between the first century BCE and the third century CE in the Greco-Roman world. First, how did physicians decide on a specific diagnosis and treatment for a patient? Second, how did they teach clinical decision making to protégés? Using studies of modern medical decision making and human cognitive processing, I argue that the Methodist approach particularly facilitated training in the diagnosis and treatment of commoner, more acute maladies, and the Galenic approach suited chronic cases, and cases involving more clinical uncertainty. The position of particular sects or physicians regarding clinical decision making relied especially on their preferred nosological categories and their means of addressing questions of observability, two aspects of a sect which also affected its approach to the training of future practitioners. Methodists were concerned about the practical utility of their classification system: the rapidity with which a trainee could acquire and apply Methodist teaching was an important part of the sect’s appeal and, potentially, its success. Galen’s approach to nosology, however, was rooted in his deep knowledge of anatomy and his wide reading of earlier medical literature. He emphasized the importance of theorizing about what was beyond the limits of direct observation, thereby developing a nosological system in which illnesses were linked with that which was not immediately observable. This required Galen, and those emulating him, to approach decision making not only less linearly, but also somewhat less systematically.

“The Vitruvian Science of Architecture: Using ‘Semantic Networks’ to Investigate the Project of De Architectura”

James Zainaldin (Harvard University)

At the beginning of his De Architectura (1.1.1), Vitruvius (V.) famously claims that architecture is composed not only of ‘construction’ (fabrica), but also ‘theorizing’ (ratiocinatio): the complete architect must be able ‘to demonstrate and explain constructions in accordance with reason and skill’ (res fabricatas sollertiae ac rationis pro portione demonstrare atque explicare). Despite V.’s insistence on the importance of ‘demonstration’ (demonstrare) and ‘explanation’ (explicare), it is not clear what role these activities play in his conception of architecture. Commentators have seen them (e.g.) as a posteriori justification for architectural practice (Callebat 1994: 35), or as a coordinated effort to communicate a broader, theoretical worldview to readers (Courrént 2005). In this paper, I propose another interpretation: the terms highlight what might be called the ‘scientific’ agenda of De Architectura, namely, the proposal of a flexible system for deriving architectural practice from secure natural principles. V. models a conception of architecture that requires experiment, observation, and reasoning drawing on the principles (rationes) afforded by other branches of knowledge. In line with this panel’s intention to investigate alternative research methods for scientific and technical writing, I argue this thesis with the aid of the software Arboreal, a program that allows for the generation of sophisticated ‘semantic networks’ to visualize the distribution and association of clusters of terms in a text (Schiefsky 2015). Using Arboreal, I track ‘metascientific’ terminology in De Architectura associated with observation, analogy, experiment, and induction, and show how this language both structures the treatise and points up its ‘scientific’ dimension.

“Teaching Technology across Cultures: The Patio Process in 16th-century Potosí”

Renée Raphael (University of California, Irvine)

European mining techniques were initially inadequate to work the ores at Potosí, the largest silver mine in the early modern world. After the mine’s discovery by the Spanish in 1545, indigenous techniques, especially the pre-Hispanic guayra (wind oven), dominated silver production in the area. As the richer ores were depleted in the following decades, so did the profits and population of the newly founded imperial city. In the 1570s, however, Pedro Fernández de Velasco arrived from the viceroyalty of New Spain with a new refining technique developed by the joint efforts of Spanish and German miners that involved the amalgamation of silver with mercury. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo heard of this new technique, termed the patio process, and encouraged its adoption by subsidizing the costs of supplies, construction, and labor. He also made provisions for instruction in the new amalgamation technique for both Spaniards and the indigenous miners forced to work the mines as part of the mita system of tribute labor. In this talk, I rely on archival documents from Potosí generated by the miners’ guild, as well as letters sent between Spain and the imperial city in the last decades of the sixteenth century, to detail these attempts at technical education. Comparison with published accounts of the amalgamation process as carried out in Potosi reveals the differences between on-the-ground technological practice and training versus that developed for an audience of university-trained readers and policy-makers.