My research centres on medicine and philosophy in the Graeco-Roman world. I have particular interests in theories of the mind in relation to the body; ethics and the emotions; health, disease and ancient clinical practice; and the perception and experience of time. I have a specialist focus on the enormously influential medical and philosophical author Galen of Pergamon (2nd century AD), many of whose works I have translated into English – in several cases for the first time ever – for Oxford World’s Classics (1997) and subsequently in the ongoing Cambridge Galen Translations series.

I have written a monograph on the perception and awareness of time in the ancient world: Time for the Ancients: Measurement, Theory, Experience (De Gruyter, 2022) (free to download) and am currently preparing a book on mind and body in ancient thought for publication with Routledge. I am also co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Galen.

I have been funded for my research by the Wellcome Trust, at both Newcastle University and Birkbeck, University of London (project: ‘Galen on the Pulse)’; and also by the Humboldt Foundation and the Einstein Center Chronoi in Berlin.

Alongside these main research areas I also have active interests in: ancient techniques and texts of psychotherapeutics (Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, Seneca); Plato and the Neoplatonist tradition; ancient pharmacology; the history of the book; drama and performance practice; music theory; and Sanskrit and ancient Indian thought.

Publications

1. BOOKS

Time for the Ancients: Measurement, Theory, Experience. De Gruyter: 2022

Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine: From Celsus to Paul of Aegina (co-edited with C. Thumiger). Brill: 2018

Galen: Works on Human Nature, vol. I: Mixtures (De temperamentis) (with P. van der Eijk). Cambridge University Press: 2018

Galen: Psychological Writings. Cambridge University Press: 2013

Galen: Selected Works (translation, introduction and notes). Oxford University Press: 1997

IN PRESS: Galen: Writings on Health: Thrasybulus and Health (De sanitate tuenda), translated with introduction and commentary, Cambridge Galen Translations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. ONLINE LECTURES

Times of life, lives in time: Galen on the ages and aging of men’, Chronoi Talks, 1 April 2021

How did people in the ancient world experience time-related distress?’, youtube Chronoi Answers series, July 2020

3. BOOK CHAPTERS, JOURNAL AND ENCYCLOPAEDIA ARTICLES

‘The relationship between perceptual experience and logos: Galen’s clinical perspective’, in. R. J. Hankinson and M. Havrda (eds.) Experience, Reason, and Method: Studies in Galen’s Scientific Epistemology, 156–89. Cambridge University Press: 2022

‘Beyond and behind the commentary: Galen on Hippocrates on elements’, in P. Pormann (ed.) Hippocrates East and West: Commentaries in the Greek, Latin, Syriac and Arabic Traditions, Studies in Ancient Medicine 56, 114–46. Brill: 2021

Is Graeco-Roman medicine holistic? Galen and ancient medical-philosophical debates’, in C. Thumiger, (ed.) Holism in Ancient Medicine and its Reception. Brill: 2021

A change in the substance: theory and its limits in Galen’s Simples, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 70 (2020): 16–53

Galen on pneuma: between metaphysical speculation and anatomical theory’, in S. Coughlin, D. Leith and D. Lewis (eds), The Concept of Pneuma after Aristotle, 237–81. Edition Topoi: 2020

Classification, explanation and experience: mental disorder in Graeco-Roman antiquity’, in U. Steinert (ed.) Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures: Sickness, Health and Local Epistemologies, 279–306. Medicine and the Body in Antiquity. Routledge: 2020

Galen and the culture of Pergamon: a view of Greek medical-intellectual life in Roman Asia’, in B. Türkmen, F. Kurunaz, N. Ermiş and Y. Ekıncı Danişan (eds), 2. Uluslararası Bergama Sempozyumu, 9-10 Mayıs 2013, 131–69. Bergama/Izmir: 2019

‘New light and old texts: Galen on his own books’, in C. Petit (ed.) Galen’s Treatise Περὶ ἀλυπίας (De indolentia) in Context: A Tale of Resilience. Studies in Ancient Medicine 52, ch. 4, 91–131. Brill: 2019

‘A new distress: Galen’s ethics in Περὶ ἀλυπίας and beyond’, in C. Petit (ed.) Galen’s Treatise Περὶ ἀλυπίας (De indolentia) in Context: A Tale of Resilience. Studies in Ancient Medicine 52, ch. 7, pp. 180–98. Brill: 2019

‘Note on MS Vlatadon 14: a summary of the main findings and problems’, in C. Petit (ed.) Galen’s Treatise Περὶ ἀλυπίας (De indolentia) in Context: A Tale of Resilience. Studies in Ancient Medicine 52, ch. 1, 10–37. Brill, 2019

The mockery of madness: laughter at and with madness in Attic Tragedy and Old Comedy’, Illinois Classical Studies (special issue, Morbid Laughter: Exploring the Comic Dimensions of Disease in Classical Antiquity, ed. G. Kazantzidis and N. Tsoumpra) 43:2 (2018), 298–325

‘Galen’s pathological soul: diagnosis and therapy in ethical and medical texts and contexts’, in C. Thumiger and P. N. Singer (ed.) Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine: from Celsus to Paul of Aegina, 381–420. Brill: 2018

‘The essence of rage: Galen on emotional disturbances and their physical correlates, in R. Seaford, J. Wilkins and M. Wright (eds) Selfhood and the Soul: Essays on Ancient Thought and Literature in Honour of Christopher Gill, 161–96. Oxford University Press: 2017

‘Galen’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 2016/2021

‘The fight for health: tradition, competition, subdivision and philosophy in Galen’s hygienic writings’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22:5 (2014), 974–95

‘Galen and the philosophers: philosophical engagement, shadowy contemporaries, Aristotelian transformations’, in P. Adamson, R. Hansberger and J. Wilberding (eds) Philosophical Themes in Galen, 7-38. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 114: 2014

‘Levels of explanation in Galen’, Classical Quarterly 47:2 (1997), 525–42

Notes on Galen’s Hippocrates’, in M. Vegetti and S. Gastaldi (eds), Studi di storia della medicina antica e medievale, pp. 66–76. La Nuova Italia: 1996

Some Hippocratic mind-body problems’, in J. A. López Férez (ed.) Actas del VIIe Colloque International Hippocratique, 131–43. Madrid, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia: 1992

4. BOOK CHAPTERS, JOURNAL AND ENCYCLOPAEDIA ARTICLES (FORTHCOMING)

‘What is a pathos? Where medicine meets philosophy’, in G. Kazantzidis and D. Spatharas (eds.) Medical Understandings of Emotions in Antiquity: Theory, Practice and Sufferings, Trends in Classics Supplementary Volumes, Ancient Emotions series. De Gruyter

‘Graeco-Roman emotion therapy: medical techniques, biological understandings’, in D. Cairns and C. Virág (eds) Emotions in Early Greece and Ancient China. Oxford University Press

(in review) ‘Recasting Greek Tragedy: character doubling and its ramifications, from Aeschylus to Euripides’