Maddalena Rumor

Maddalena Rumor is a Doctoral Fellow of the Wissensgeschichte Topoi Program at the Freie Universität.  She is mostly interested in Ancient Mesopotamian Medicine, Pharmacology and Chemistry and is researching how these sciences related with neighboring Graeco-Roman cultures.  For her dissertation within Topoi (E-CSG-III From Technology to Science: The Spread of Knowledge), she is focusing on a rather obscure aspect of pharmacology: the use/misuse of disgusting ingredients, or Dreckapotheke, in ancient medicine.  Her goal is to better understand the original therapeutic functions of these types of materia medica through an examination of their first recorded classifications in Mesopotamia and by comparing these with later interpretations, especially those in the Greco-Roman tradition.

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