Institute Collaborations
Activity in the Institute is expanding quickly. In June, the Institute has been invited to collaborate to fascinating extra-mural projects, one of which is a garden of medicinal plants of the International Hippocratic Foundation in Kos, Greece, the native island of the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates (460-between 375 and 351 B.C.).
This is not a garden of medicinal plants like any other in the world, but a garden that contains only plants used for therapeutic purposes by the physicians who wrote the many works attributed to Hippocrates. Surprisingly, many of these plants are ordinary ones, from hellebore to garlic and leek, for example. Activity in the Institute also takes place in-house. During this summer, four young scholars are doing research with the Institute. Madeline Brown, from Brown University, has won one of the prestigious Natural History Research Experience internships offered by the Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution; she explores the diet of ancient Romans, with a particular focus on the plants. Livia Radici, a Post-Doc in Classics at the University of Messina (Italy), revises her PhD thesis on the diffusion of ancient Greek toxicology during the Renaissance, and also prepares an Italian translation of the most ancient Greek treatises on venoms and poisons, the Thêriaka and Alexipharmaka by Nicander (2nd [?] cent. B.C.). Vincenzo Tavernese, a medical student at the same university, reads the Medicinalium libri (Books of remedies) by the Italian Renaissance scientist and philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), in order to evaluate their pharmacological interest. Marianna Koronitou from Corinth (Greece), who has a degree in chemistry, collaborates with the program History, Philosophy and Didactics of Science and Technology of the National Hellenic Research Foundation and the University of Athens. For her PhD thesis, she will be in residence at the Institute this August to study formulae for medicines in the Dynameron by the 13th-century Byzantine physician Nikolaos Myrepsos.
