In the Grip of Disease Studies in the Greek Imagination [Paperback]

This original and lively book uses texts from ancient medicine, epic, lyric, tragedy, historiography, philosophy, and religion to explore the influence of Greek ideas on health and disease on Greek thought. Fundamental issues are deeply implicated: causation and responsibility, purification and pollution, the mind-body relationship and gender differences, authority and the expert, reality and appearances, good government, and good and evil themselves.

1. Anthropological Perspectives
2. Archaic Literature and Masters of Truth
3. Secularization and Sacralization
4. Tragedy
5. The Historians
6. Plato
7. Aristotle
8. After Aristotle: Or Did Anything Change?
9. Epilogue

This study is impressive. Lloyd...emphasizes the diversity of classical approaches to disease as much as any common ground. --Times Literary Supplement

This is a stimulating and erudite study of many often-neglected aspects of ancient Greek thought by an acclaimed master of the subject. --Bulletin of the History of Medicine

G. E. R. Lloydis Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University of Cambridge.