Diagnosing and Treating Disease in Byzantine Hospitals

EVENT CANCELLED

King’s College London, Council Room, Strand Campus, King's College London

King’s Centre for Hellenic Studies presents a talk by Dr Petros Bouras-Valliantos.

Dr Bouras- Valliantos will discus his research on the diagnosis and treatment of disease in Byzantine hospitals (xenōnes), using evidence from the corpus of surviving Byzantine hospital recipe books (xenōnes). He will also reference important non-medical sources such as charters of medical institutions, legal sources, epistolography and archaeological evidence. Petros will pay particular attention to the role of uroscopy in the diagnosis and prediction of disease and also examines the field of therapeutics. He will investigate drug therapy, and if it was allied with dietetics and surgery, the impact of Arabic versus classical pharmacology, the introduction of expensive exotic substances such as the Black Death and will also explore the recipes for women’s diseases.

The seminar will be followed by the launch of his recently published book, ‘Innovation in Byzantine Medicine: The Writings of John Zacharias Aktouarios (c.1275-c.1330)’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), in which he sheds light on medical practices during the Byzantine era.

Dr Petros Bouras-Vallianatos studied pharmacy and ancient and Byzantine history, before obtaining his PhD in 2015 from King’s College London. After holding a Wellcome Research Fellowship at the University of London, he was appointed to a permanent post in the School of History, Classics & Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. He is currently working on a five-year Wellcome funded project, Making and Consuming Drugs in the Italian and Byzantine Worlds (12th-15th c.).