Mental Health in Late Antique Medicine: Caelius Aurelianus on Mental Disorders

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Chiara Thumiger, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Ancient History
• Term: from 2015 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 278071349

The larger frame of my research project aims to contribute to our understanding of the history of concepts, representations and methods of management of mental health and mental disorder in Antiquity. This aim is pursued by focussing on a key (and understudied) author of Late Antiquity, Caelius Aurelianus, a fifth-century AD North African (Numidian) medical writer belonging to the Methodist tradition. Caelius Aurelianus produced a major nosological work in Latin, which contains extremely rich material for a history of ancient medical thought on mental health. First of all, his work shows a strong relationship with its Greek sources and authorities: although his is the only major work in Latin still extant in ancient medicine (together with the De Medicina by Celsus) the foregrounded dialogue it establishes with the Greek tradition, and the bilingual and intercultural nature of the late-antique milieu in which Caelius operated make his text a key testimony of Graeco-Roman medicine as a whole. This unique positioning of Caelius' contribution has determined, on the other hand, some scholarly excess in the evaluation of Caelius' relationship to his predecessors: for a long time the predominant view saw Caelius mostly as a translator of the great first-century Methodist physician Soranus, whose major nosological work is now lost, and this prejudice sometimes still resists outside the narrower circle of specialists. Closer analysis of Caelius' text categorically disproves this view, revealing him as a strong and original thinker. Our topic of choice, mental health, shows him at the height of his powers, both as doctrinal theorist and as clinical observer. My aim is thus to analyse in detail the development of medical ideas about mental health in this important author who is still yet to receive the focused scholarly attention he deserves. I shall both explore the diseases of mental import he describes (the classic ones - phrenitis, mania, furor and melancholia - as well as those that show to a greater extent his innovative approaches), and highlight the larger theoretical questions he poses when it comes to mental and bodily health, to the causation of mental diseases, and to therapeutical possibilities. The outcome of this research will be a monographic study devoted to Caelius Aurelianus on Mental Health.This research will contribute in a decisive way to current historiographies of ancient medical cultures, filling an important gap in the studies of ancient medicine. This period of study, and the author under focus, are of unique promise: first, this medical work offers such richness and systematicity when it comes to psychiatric topics as to be unparalleled in earlier literature. Secondly, in this period the medical Graeco-Roman tradition goes through a synthesis and systematization of the past which will give it the shape that will remain foundational in European thought.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants