Morbid Laughter: Exploring the Comic Dimensions of Disease in Classical Antiquity

Abstract

disease in the Graeco-Roman world has attracted considerable attention among classical scholars in recent years. a number of important studies have helped to broaden our understanding of sickness and suffering as means by which subjective experience is construed and the self is negotiated;1 no less importantly, the increasing literature on mental illness in ancient medical and philosophical texts2 has led to new modes of viewing disease as a pathological occurrence which can compromise the integrity not only of the body but of the mind and soul as well. more recently, the growing interest in the notion of disability in classical literature3 has called attention to the barriers posed by infirmity in a person’s life and to their disruptive effects on the relationship between the affected individual and the rest of the community. this novel perspective and the attendant shift of focus from the practitioner’s to the patient’s point of view,4 has opened a window to the lived experiences of the disabled and the diseased, providing us access to how they perceived themselves as being different and, more crucially, as being set apart from others. We now know more about the reasons why impairment in antiquity, broadly understood as any condition which entailed a deviation from a desired state of health, was both a self-alienating but also a socially isolating experience.5 The present volume makes a contribution to the burgeoning field of the history of disease in classical antiquity by focusing on a specific, yet all but paradoxical