Tools and the Organism: Technology and the Body in Ancient Greek and Roman Medicine

The first book to show how the concept of bodily organs emerged and how ancient tools influenced conceptualizations of human anatomy and its operations.   Medicine is itself a type of technology, involving therapeutic tools and substances, and so one can write the history of medicine as the application of different technologies to the human body. In Tools and the Organism, Colin Webster argues that, throughout antiquity, these tools were crucial to broader theoretical shifts. Notions changed about what type of object a body is, what substances constitute its essential nature, and how its parts interact. By following these changes and taking the question of technology into the heart of Greek and Roman medicine, Webster reveals how the body was first conceptualized as an “organism”—a functional object whose inner parts were tools, or organa, that each completed certain vital tasks. He also shows how different medical tools created different bodies.   Webster’s approach provides both an overarching survey of the ways that technologies impacted notions of corporeality and corporeal behaviors and, at the same time, stays attentive to the specific material details of ancient tools and how they informed assumptions about somatic structures, substances, and inner processes. For example, by turning to developments in water-delivery technologies and pneumatic tools, we see how these changing material realities altered theories of the vascular system and respiration across Classical antiquity. Tools and the Organism makes the compelling case for why telling the history of ancient Greco-Roman medical theories, from the Hippocratics to Galen, should pay close attention to the question of technology.

Table of Contents:
Abbreviations Notes on Translations, Names, Citations, and Editions Introduction    0.1 Technologies and the Consolidation of the Body    0.2 Teleology, Mechanism, Vitalism, and Technology    0.3 Analogies, Metaphors, and Models    0.4 Chapter Overview 1: Hippocrates and Technological Interfaces    1.0 Introduction    1.1 Corporeal Composition without Organs    1.2 Regimen and the Body    1.3 Hippocrates’s Nature of the Human    1.4 Medical Implements and Hippocrates’s Morb. 4/Genit./Nat. Pue.    1.5 Female Corporeality and Gynecological Technologies    1.6 Conclusion 2: The Origins of the Organism    2.0 Introduction    2.1 Empedocles’s Clepsydra and the Corporeal Interior    2.2 Physikoi on Corporeal Tools    2.3 Plato’s Timaeus and Competing Technological Heuristics    2.4 Respiration, the Clepsydra, and Irrigation Pipes of the Fifth Century BCE    2.5 Irrigation and Water Distribution Technologies    2.6 Conclusion 3: Aristotle and the Emergence of the Organism    3.0 Introduction    3.1 The Soul and the Organism    3.2 The Tools of the Heart    3.3 The Journey of the Blood    3.4 Automata and Animal Motion    3.5 Conclusion    4: The Rise of the Organism in the Hellenistic Period    4.0 Introduction    4.1 The Rise of Anatomy    4.2 Herophilus of Chalcedon and Dissection Practices    4.3. Herophilus’s Bellows    4.4 Erasistratus of Ceos and Pneumatic Pathologies    4.5 Conclusion 5: The Organism and Its Alternatives    5.0 Introduction    5.1 Post-Erasistratean Hellenistic Organa    5.2 The Empiricist Resistance    5.3 The Infrastructure of Roman Power    5.4 Asclepiades of Bithynia    5.5 Asclepiades and Aqueducts    5.6 Methodism and Pneumatism    5.7 Soranus and Female Corporeality in Methodism    5.8 Conclusion 6: Galen and the Technologies of the Vitalist Organism    6.0 Introduction    6.1 The Return of Anatomy    6.2 Galen of Pergamon and On the Function of the Parts    6.3 Technologies and the Natural Faculties    6.4 Vivisection and the Vitalist Body    6.5 Logical and Material Tools of the Lemmatized Body    6.6 The Material Technologies of Vitalism    6.7 Conclusion Conclusion Acknowledgments Bibliography  

About the Author :
Colin Webster is assistant professor of classics at the University of California, Davis.

Review :
“Webster has written a fascinating and challenging book . . . there are provocative insights on almost every page. Above all, it enlarges our understanding of the development of Greek medical ideas by providing a bridge between medical and non-medical ideas of the human organism and between the words of philosophers and physicians and the unheard world of the artisan craftsman.”  “Webster’s book delivers a rich, multilayered exploration of how ancient thinkers used tools—both literal and metaphorical—as a lens to understand the human body. His work not only deepens our comprehension of ancient medicine but also skillfully bridges classical and contemporary perspectives on the body as a sophisticated system of organa.” “Taken as a whole . . . this is an original, engaging and thought-provoking monograph. Webster raises many questions, both about his specific topic and more basic epistemological questions about how knowledge was constructed in the past—and indeed how we do so today.” “Webster offers a novel and sophisticated analysis of the debates found in ancient medical writers' works, with an argument grounded in the societies that produced the texts.”  “[Webster] ends by pointing out how successful the analogy with tools and mechanisms has been both in advancing understanding of how the body functions, and as a spur to inventing machines that would do the work of the body e.g. iron lungs. This book will appeal to the classicist interested in original sources and interpretation of the Greek, to the medical historian, and any doctor with an interest in medical history.” “Tools and the Organism makes the novel and convincing argument that ancient Greek medical and philosophical conceptions of the body were influenced at a fundamental level by contemporary technologies. Webster’s observations are fresh, creative, and insightful.” “A compelling, enriching, and original book. Webster transforms our understanding of the relationship between technology and corporeality in the ancient world and beyond.” “Tools and the Organism offers a fascinating, original, and persuasive account of how the concept of the organic body developed in feedback loops with the use of technology. Webster’s analysis is admirably nuanced in its reading of ancient Greek medical and philosophical texts in their material environment. He also shows the significance of this early history to contemporary thinking about the organism.”