Hippocratic Machines with Dr Maria Gerolemou

Whereas there are certain studies on medical tools in antiquity, none of them deals with what is called in scholarship medical machine. In this talk, I offer first a brief overview of the Hippocratic notion of mêchanê by presenting three different types of machines a. natural machines; b. simple machines; c. complicated machines. Second, I discuss three examples of complicated Hippocratic machines (the Hippocratic board, ladder and the bench) and suggest ways of approaching them.