The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical
body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a
mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through
classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early
ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the
traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece.
Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sôma) became a subject of
physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the
meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature.
By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from
the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in
large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people
began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once
attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms
began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances
hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person
but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to
radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and
ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of
the self.
The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how
classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential
ways of thinking about the human subject.
