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

我的研究项目的更大框架旨在帮助我们理解古代精神健康和精神障碍管理的概念、表现和方法的历史。这一目标是通过聚焦于一位关键的(和未被研究的)晚期古代作者凯利厄斯·奥雷利亚努斯，一位公元5世纪属于卫理公会传统的北非(努米迪亚)医学作家来实现的。凯利厄斯·奥雷利亚努斯用拉丁语创作了一部重要的神学著作，其中包含了极其丰富的古代心理健康医学思想史的材料。首先，他的作品显示了与希腊来源和当局的强大关系：虽然他的作品是古医学中唯一仍然存在的拉丁文主要作品(连同Celsus的de Medicina)，但它与希腊传统建立了突出的对话，以及Caelius在其中运作的晚期古董环境的双语和跨文化性质，使他的文本成为Graeco-Roman医学作为一个整体的关键见证。这种独特的Caelius的贡献定位决定了，另一方面，在评估Caelius与他的前任的关系一些学术上的过度：在很长一段时间里，占主导地位的观点认为Caelius主要是一个伟大的第一世纪卫理公会医生索拉努斯的翻译，他的主要神学工作现在已经丢失，这种偏见有时仍然抵制外面的专家狭隘的圈子。对凯利厄斯文本的仔细分析彻底驳斥了这一观点，揭示了他是一位强大而独到的思想家。我们选择的话题，精神健康，显示了他作为教义理论家和临床观察家的权力的顶峰。因此，我的目的是详细分析这位重要的作者关于精神健康的医学思想的发展，他仍然没有得到他应有的集中学术关注。我将探索他描述的精神疾病(经典的疾病--咽炎、躁狂、愤怒和忧郁症--以及那些在更大程度上展示了他的创新方法的疾病)，并强调他提出的更大的理论问题，涉及到精神和身体健康、精神疾病的原因和治疗的可能性。这项研究的结果将是一项致力于凯利厄斯·奥雷利亚诺关于精神健康的专题性研究。这项研究将对当今古代医学文化的史学做出决定性的贡献，填补古代医学研究的一个重要空白。这段时间的研究和作者的关注是独特的前景：首先，这部医学著作提供了如此丰富和系统的精神病学主题，这是早期文献中无与伦比的。其次，在这一时期，罗马医学传统经历了对过去的综合和系统化，这将使它的形态保持在欧洲思想的基础上。

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.