'The Asclepion' on CTCWeb site

IU historian Nancy Demand’s Web work helps students and educators understand ancient medical practices in a cultural context.

Demand was the winner of AbleMedia’s Bronze Chalice award in mid-December for her work, The Asclepion, published on the Classics Technology Center on the Web (CTCWeb):

http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb

“Nancy provides students with a look not only at the academic study of ancient science and medical practices, but also at ancient societies’ need to understand disease and healing,” said Wendy Owens, CTCWeb editor-in-chief.

The Asclepion provides information on health and medicine in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Using translations of ancient medical text, historical facts and images of ancient medical instruments, Demand presents the history of ancient medicine in layman’s terms.

“ The Asclepion was designed to be an Internet source that presents the study of ancient medicine in a manner that is both accessible and useful to the general public and to students,” Demand said. “No previous knowledge of ancient history or medicine is expected.”

Demand has extracted information from a variety of textual sources, such as the Homeric writings and Egyptian medical papyri, concerning ancient medical practices, cultural values regarding disease, medical treatment and patterns of disease. The Asclepion offers a comprehensive overview of Hippocratic medicine, which formed the basis of Western medical theory until the 19th century, covering Hippocratic treatises on setting broken bones, epidemics, cult cures, gynecology and the use of drugs.

“The first tendency of many of us is to view the diagnoses and treatments of ancient medicine as weird and outlandish, clearly a product of ignorance and superstition, although with an occasional lucky discovery that actually ‘worked,’” Demand said. “The approach of ‘The Asclepion’ is to understand medicine within its cultural context rather than to judge it in terms of modern biomedicine.”

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CTCWeb serves hundreds of thousands of educators, students and other users in more than 65 countries and the number of users is doubling annually. CTCWeb is a repository of practical tools, for classicists and other educators, to enhance the use of computer technology in classics education.

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