Dr David Leith

My main research interests are in Graeco-Roman medicine.

One strand of my research looks at the ways in which ancient medicine and philosophy interacted and influenced each other in Graeco-Roman antiquity. This has led to an interest especially in the so-called medical 'sects' which developed from the beginning of the Hellenistic period, including the doctors Herophilus of Chalcedon, Erasistratus of Ceos, the Pneumatist Athenaeus of Attaleia, the Methodists, the Empiricists, and of course Galen. A particular focus has been Asclepiades of Bithynia, the first major medical authority to be based in Rome, around the end of the second and the early first centuries BC. He played an important role in giving Greek medicine an intellectual and cultural respectability in its new Roman context, but he is also of interest for his deep engagement with Hellenistic philosophy, in particular Epicurean atomism, which he adopted, but also deliberately modified, in developing his own theory of human physiology and pathology. 

More recently, I have been working on the development of the Hippocratic tradition in the Hellenistic period, especially the ways in which images of Hippocrates were being constructed, how the assemblage of the Hippocratic Corpus in third-century BCE Alexandria influenced this, and the general question of what kind of authority 'Hippocrates' held at this time. A recent article in this area, for example, aims to show how the idea that Hippocrates had a son-in-law named Polybus is simply a Hellenistic fabrication aimed at reconciling conflicting sources: Polybus was indeed the author of the surviving Hippocratic treatise On the Nature of the Human Being (Nat. Hom.), but in fact there is no reason to link either author or text with Hippocrates. 

I also have continuing interests in how Greek papyri from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt can contribute to our understanding of ancient medicine.

Biography

Born in Co. Down, Northern Ireland, I took my BA (1998-2001), MA (2001-2002) and PhD (2003-2006), all in Classics, at University College London. My interest in Graeco-Roman medicine grew out of my doctoral thesis, supervised by Prof. Cornelia Römer and Prof. Vivian Nutton, which edited a selection of Greek medical papyri from Oxyrhynchus. I then worked as part of a Wellcome Trust-funded project at UCL to edit a larger batch of Oxyrhynchus medical papyri (2006-2010). From 2010-2013, I was a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and a College Research Associate at Jesus College, before being lucky enough to move to Exeter in September 2013.