Title: Re-Orienting Ancient Medicine Courses

Description: Re-orienting Ancient Medicine Courses 

Aileen Das (University of Michigan) and Jay Crisostomo (University of Michigan)

April 22 @ 4-5pm EST via Zoom

This pedagogy workshop is aimed at (past, current, and would-be) instructors of ancient medicine, science, and technology courses who would be keen to integrate material from the pre-modern Middle East. Popular and more academic narratives often equate ancient medicine with Greco-Roman medicine and frame its study as an originist history of a monolithic western medical tradition. When these narratives introduce content from the pre-modern Middle East, such as from Assyria or the medieval Islamicate world, they define the contribution of Middle Eastern knowledge-makers in terms of their anticipation or preservation of a western science. This workshop will discuss ways of foregrounding the theories and actors of pre-modern Middle Eastern science, technology, and medicine without rendering them subservient to a hegemonic “western tradition”. Moreover, we will review a range of primary and secondary source materials that we utilize in our own teaching of these subjects.

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Co-sponsored by the UC Davis Early Science Workshop

Date: 22 April 2021 4:00 pm EDT EST