Resources

Lessons

1. Lesson 1: Hippocratic Foundations

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   Students examine the biologically-focused foundational concepts and explanatory strategies of Western medicine first inscribed in the works of Hippocrates. Close

2. Lesson 2: Late Ancient and Medieval Medical Views of Mind and Body

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   Students explore Hippocrates’ principal successor Galen among the late ancient medical writers, Galen’s departures from Hippocrates’ ideas on mind and body, and Avicenna's and Maimonides’ continuation of Galen’s approach among the medieval writers.Close

3. Lesson 3: Mind and Body in Renaissance and Early Modern Medicine

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   Students look at the framework of medical belief and practice in the late 15th, 16th, and early 17th centuries and focuses on the persistence of older ways of thinking about the mind-body relationship despite certain new developments in medical science. Students also examine early modern court records for the contemporary lay perspective on “insanity.”Close

4. Lesson 4: Mind and Body in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

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   Students examine Shakespeare’s own ideas and compares them to those of his contemporaries, again focusing on the mind-body theme. Although there was great general continuity between ancient, medieval, and early modern ideas on both basic human biology and strategies for explaining disease symptoms, different authors sometimes chose to emphasize the mind or the body to different degrees.Close

5. Lesson 5: Descartes and Aftermath

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   Students closely study Rene Descartes’s innovative philosophical ideas on mind-body dualism as a challenge to the beliefs about human behavior and disease causation commonly accepted in classical, medieval, and early modern medicine. Students also look at the impact of Descartes’s ideas on medicine in the late 17th and 18th century and beyond.Close

6. Lesson 6: The Modern Era

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   Students explore broad themes in the development of modern medicine from ca. 1800 to the present and concentrates on the general triumph of biological approaches to both physical and mental diseases in that period. The development of modern biologically-based psychiatric therapy for mood and behavioral disorders and mental illness underscores a parallel between ideas in our own time and many of the ideas in Shakespeare’s. This lesson also includes a list of topics and resources for students to take on research papers, small group presentations, or classroom debates.Close

7. About the Author