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

我的研究项目的大框架旨在帮助我们理解古代心理健康和精神障碍的概念，表现和管理方法的历史。这一目标是追求集中在一个关键（和欠研究）的作者古代晚期，Caelius Aurelianus，公元五世纪的北非（努米底亚）医学作家属于卫理公会传统。Caelius Aurelianus用拉丁语撰写了一部重要的疾病分类学著作，其中包含了关于精神健康的古代医学思想史的极其丰富的材料。首先，他的作品与希腊的来源和权威有着密切的关系：尽管他的作品是古代医学中唯一现存的拉丁文主要作品（与Celsus的De Medicina一起），但它与希腊传统建立了前景化的对话，以及Caelius所处的古代晚期环境的双语和跨文化性质，使他的文本成为整个希腊罗马医学的关键证据。另一方面，这种对Caelius贡献的独特定位，也决定了在评价Caelius与他的前辈的关系时，学术界的一些过度：很长一段时间以来，主流观点认为Caelius主要是作为一世纪伟大的卫理公会医生Soranus的翻译者，Soranus的主要疾病分类学工作现在已经丢失，这种偏见有时仍然在狭窄的专家圈子之外抵制。对Caelius文本的仔细分析断然否定了这一观点，揭示了他作为一个强大而原始的思想家。我们选择的主题，心理健康，展示了他作为教义理论家和临床观察者的最高权力。因此，我的目的是详细分析这位重要作者关于心理健康的医学思想的发展，他仍然没有得到应有的学术关注。我将探讨他所描述的精神方面的重要疾病（经典的疾病--精神分裂症、躁狂症、狂暴症和精神分裂症--以及那些在更大程度上展示了他的创新方法的疾病），并强调他在精神和身体健康、精神疾病的病因和治疗可能性方面提出的更大的理论问题。这项研究的结果将是一个专题研究，专门为Caelius Aurelianus的心理健康。这一研究将对当前的古代医学文化史研究作出决定性的贡献，填补古代医学研究的一个重要空白。这一时期的研究，以及作者的关注，是独特的承诺：首先，这一医学工作提供了这样的丰富性和系统性，当涉及到精神病学的主题，是无与伦比的早期文学。其次，在这一时期，希腊罗马医学传统经历了对过去的综合和系统化，这将使它成为欧洲思想的基础。

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.