LIVING GUTS. Physiologische Lehren, literarische Darstellungen und Symbolik des Verdauungssystems in der griechisch-römischen Welt und ihr Erbe

The aim of this project is to offer a focused account of the importance of ‘guts’ in animal and especially human life in ancient cultures (intending by ‘guts’ the innards of the abdominal cavity associated with nutrition, digestion and evacuation, obviously an historical construct as much as an anatomical datum) and to address a specific set of research questions.
The aim is to scrutinise technical texts from ancient medicine, natural philosophy and biology, but also draw from non-technical Greco-Roman literatures. While carefully avoiding the fallacy Canguilhem once labelled the ‘virus of the precursor’, the aim is to establish a dialogue between ideas and concepts far apart in time in our medical history, and even apparently disconnected from one another, but which reveal deep analogies or meaningful differences in how the working of the human body is experienced.

This project is thus innovative in a number of ways: first, it focuses on a region of the human body and aspect of its physiology in ancient medicine which has been neglected despite its obvious physical centrality; secondly, it combines the philology of ancient texts, history of medicine, and cultural history while including consideration of current neuroscientific suggestions to bring ancient theories in dialogue with modern views and perceptions about the body; last but not least, it explicitly engages lay perceptions and literary metaphors of the body. On the whole, it aims at bringing together the history of ancient doctrines about the body and the concrete, material history of ancient life in one of its most basic aspects, the consumption of food and drink and its processes. Thus, it aims at furthering a dialogue between different areas of cultural history, while strongly affirming the relevance of ancient texts to contemporary questions and, more generally, the interlacement of history and scientific inquiry.