Manfred Horstmanshoff, born in Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 1944. Ph.D. from Leiden University. Associate Professor of Ancient History at Leiden University.
Fellow (1 September 2000 – 30 June 2001)
From Athens to Jerusalem. Medicine in Hellenized Jewish Lore and in Early Christian Literature, Papers of the Symposia in Jerusalem, 9-11 September 1996, and Rotterdam 2000, S. Kottek en M. Horstmanshoff (eds.) was presented at NIAS, 17 November 2000. The volume is the first publication in which Assyriologists, classicists and medical historians expand on a common theme. The same point of departure was chosen by the research nucleus, “Rethinking the History of Medicine: ‘Rationality’ and ‘Magic’ in Babylonia and the Graeco-Roman World”. Apart from my co-ordinating task I contributed papers on the heart, the diagnostic significance of uroscopy in Hippocratic medicine and on the Sacred Tales, a second-century book of dreams, written by the neurasthenic Alias Airsides. I argued that the influence of Hippocratic medicine on temple medicine was considerable in this period. A comparative study of Babylonian and Graeco-Roman medicine has made it possible to see that the so-called ‘irrational’ results from a different rationale and is not merely a deviation from ‘rational’ medicine. Furthermore, I have completed editing writing commentaries for a book that presents four intriguing seventeenth-century prints with a medical content: The Four Seasons of Human Life. Four Anonymous Engravings from the Trent Collection Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, edited with Translation and Full Commentary by H.F.J. Horstmanshoff et al, Trent Collection, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Erasmus Publishing, Rotterdam 2001, (with CD-ROM). The book will be published in 2001.