The UCSC Program in Classical Studies presents: Professor Brooke Holmes, Princeton University, ‘The Missíng Body: Authority, Immunity, and Objectivity in Early Greek Medical Writing”

Brooke Holmes’ paper arises from a simple question: Why doesn’t the physician draw on his experience of his own body as a source of knowledge and authority in early Greek medical writing? In trying to answer it, Professor Holmes argues that the very absence of the physician’s body represents an early phase in the history of disembodied authority in Western medicine and science.

Brooke Holmes works at the intersections of Greek literature, science and medicine, and philosophy, with particular interests in the history of subjectivity and the body, materialism, tragedy, ethics, critical theory, and reception studies. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Columbia and her Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton in 2005. She has taught since 2007 at Princeton, where she is the Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptorship, Her first book, The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece, was published in 2010 by Princeton University Press.